The Design Better Toolkit
Tools that will supercharge your work
We've partnered with some of our favorite software companies and educators to bring you the Design Better Toolkit, a collection of resources we love and use regularly. The Toolkit gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.
Please make sure to note the important guidelines about the Toolkit at the bottom of this page.
Here’s what’s in the Toolkit
Airtable lets your team create apps on top of shared data and power your most critical workflows. We use Airtable to plan our editorial calendar, and also create apps that help us manage our business (like this perks bundle!).
You’ll get a $500 Airtable credit you can apply to Airtable subscriptions or Airtable AI.
How we like to use it
Running DesignOps, organizing user research, conducting design sprints, tracking product feedback, no-code apps that solve your specific challenges. Airtable is the hub for our content strategy!
Read AI is your meeting notetaker and AI copilot. Stay on top of your meetings with transcription, live coaching, and post-meeting recaps. Read AI will send a quick report of each meeting directly to your inbox or messaging platform, complete with a summary, topics, action items, and key questions. Search all of your content including meetings, emails, messages, and docs to refresh your memory on decisions made and get deeper context for your work. Get personalized recommendations on next steps that save time and nudge you forward. Connect Read to Google, Slack, Teams, Salesforce, Notion, Asana, and all your work platforms to get summaries, recaps, and more.
We’re big fans!
You’ll get one year free of Read AI Enterprise ($270 value).
How we like to use it
A searchable single source of truth for all meetings, design sprints, and collaborative sessions. Read captures notes from all of our meetings!
Unlock every Design Better episode in Search Copilot when you sign up via the Toolkit. Explore interviews and ask questions to uncover ideas on design, research, leadership style, AI and so much more, from the top creative minds
Miro is the smart canvas that uses AI to turn your brainstorm sessions into product briefs and screenshots into prototypes. We love using Miro to run design sprints, workshops, meetings, and so much more. It’s an essential tool for all teams.
100% off of Starter Monthly or Business Monthly Miro plans ($180 value)
How we like to use it
Product briefs, prototypes, roadmaps, design sprints, collaborative meetings, conducting and organizing user research.
Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question.
Perplexity Pro is their premium subscription plan, designed to enhance your search experience with advanced features and capabilities.
You’ll get 6 months free of Perplexity Pro ($180 value).
How we like to use it
Create feature or product concept videos, edit and compile user research videos to share with colleagues, create product marketing content. We use Descript to create podcast clips and edit our video episodes.
Courses
Prototyping with Cursor
Brought to you by our our friends at Design is a Party, Prototyping with Cursor is a course that will accelerate your prototyping process with AI. This course shows you how to use Cursor to turn ideas into interactive prototypes—fast. Whether you're building from your Figma design system or starting from scratch, you’ll explore creative and technical workflows, from generating unique concepts to building pixel-perfect prototypes with real data.
The course is normally $350, but you’ll get it for $250.
Shift Nudge
Shift Nudge is the visual design course trusted by companies like Figma, Google, and others to help new and experienced designers develop and sharpen their visual skills in interface design. It’s perfect for those wanting to enter or advance in the field. This course is absolutely jam-packed with all the best information for creating great visual design for interfaces.
25% off the first payment of the Shift Nudge Pro plan ($500 value)
Get the Toolkit—become an annual subscriber
The Toolkit is yet another benefit of a Design Better Premium Plan at the annual subscription level. If you’re already a monthly subscriber, upgrade to annual to unlock this suite of tools.
Learn how to upgrade your subscription to annual.
Plus, you get our entire library of books and more
When you become an annual Premium subscriber, not only will you get The Toolkit, you’ll also get our entire library of books that cover a range of essential topics and are written by top industry experts.
Design Leadership Handbook: Take your career further whether you aspire to lead or need to become a better one. This book will give you the foundation you need.
Design Systems Handbook: Learn to design, deploy, and drive adoption of a design system in your organization with this book written by experts from Github, Salesforce, Pinterest, Etsy, and Shopify.
Design Thinking Handbook: Informed by the Stanford methodology, this book provides the foundation for innovation and product design exploration.
Designing for Emotion: Learn how to design products that inspire trust, overcome user fears, and create lasting impressions with this classic that’s inspired teams at The White House, Intuit, Google, and more.
DesignOps Handbook: Written by DesignOps pioneers, this book is the essential guide to improving your team’s core operations so designers can focus on what they love most—design.
Principles of Product Design: There is a proven recipe for making great products, and this book lays it all out with real-world examples of the best design teams.
Collaboration Handbook: Collaboration is a critical capability for designing great products at scale. The Collaboration Handbook shows how teams at inspiring companies like Netflix, Google, and Airbnb build trust, align around purpose, and work across disciplines—and how you can learn to do the same.
Design Engineering Handbook: This book shows you how to bridge the gap between design and engineering to turn collaboration into a competitive edge. Featuring insights from leaders at The New York Times, Mailchimp, Minted, and Indeed, it shares practical frameworks for prototyping, building design systems, and uniting form and function to create better products faster.
Animation Handbook: This is the guide to using purposeful motion in digital product design, turning static interfaces into dynamic, meaningful experiences. Written by two-time Apple Design Award winner Ryan McLeod and featuring insights from Google, Slack, Dropbox, and Apple, it shows how to apply principles like timing, easing, and choreography to smooth transitions, reduce cognitive load, and create products that feel alive, responsive, and human.
A few guidelines about the Toolkit
To access the Toolkit, you must have an active annual subscription to Design Better Premium. Monthly subscribers aren’t eligible, but can upgrade to the yearly level to get access.
This offer is only available to new paying customers of the partner products. If you’ve previously paid for any product in the Toolkit, you won’t be eligible for the perks of that specific product.
Both new and existing annual subscribers are eligible to claim the Toolkit.
To claim, you must use form below. Codes are limited and may run out over time. This offer may be discontinued at any point.
If you cancel your Design Better Premium subscription early or request a chargeback, any Toolkit codes you've received—used or unused—will be deactivated.