Creative Tooling

Explorations in Future Forward Thinking












PRODUCT DESIGNERShravani Kasralikar


Shravani is a product and web designer crafting intuitive and visually engaging digital experiences. She enjoys finding practical solutions to ambiguous problems and values intentionality above all.


What mediums do you create in?
Digital product designer / freelancer

What tools do you currently use in your creative process?
Pinterest, Arena, Behance, Cosmos 
They all lack in something, either discoverability or better organization

Canva?
Hasn’t used it recently, used it in college when trying to learn graphic design
Positioned for the inexperienced designer with drag and drop/presets, limiting as you can’t create vector illustrations, flex around with typography, lacking versatility
More curated tool, less of a playground

How do you gather inspiration? Create? Debut?
Moodboarding process for clients
Downloading images, putting them in a Figma file, arranging them into a moodboard presentation

No easy way to put the images all in one place 
Moodboarding is so much more than showing images for inspiration, it’s communicating a vision + curation

Researching is the longest part of the work, value props, building out from there is routine
  • Could be cool to have a platform to directly import images from Pinterest / categorize / directly create board ie. here are all the colors that seem to go with the pics, similar pictures
  • Don’t want to download, rescan to make them the same size, put them in a presentation frame, annoying and unnecessary
  • Going thru with coworker to pick out colors for color palette / brand
    • If done well, would be cool
    • Refresh the photos
    • “Been doing the grunt work for a while now”
  • Designers mind works well with a canvas



How do you get feedback?
Sharing 3 mood board options as an example & pitches to a client

If you could change one thing about your creative process, what would it be?

Market research created from scratch

Organizing files (naming layers, making sure everything is organized)

Open Illustrator/Figma and have things be organized / premade

Feels complicated when you’re in the flow state of working

Less experienced designer


Invoicing systems

CRM tool for creatives
  • Notion tried to solve with hyperlinks to create organization

“As a designer, you just want to design”