Why Does Koen Bok Say Design Tools Will Look Like Notion?

Koen Bok says he and Jorn van Dijk were wrong about high-fidelity tools. They started Framer convinced that design needed more of them. Touch was the last big innovation in interaction design, an engineer invented it, and years of Flash work shaped how the future of tools looked. The future of design tooling looks like Notion or FigJam, lower fidelity, and the old pitch stopped being believable.

The break showed up over lunch in the summer, while Jorn van Dijk was on leave with a three-week-old, his second child. The pitch that the old direction would still work had run out. A canvas and a pile of technology were already in hand, and stopping was the first question. Three paths sat on the table: a real design tool, whiteboarding, or a web design tool. The web path appealed because a visual tool could make websites good enough to win prizes, then solve the problems underneath. Canva does strong work as a platform, and the work they want is still the top level of design.