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 Pro ($180 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
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.
Coming soon: 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.
Coming soon: Get 3 FULL lessons from the full Shift Nudge course sent right to your inbox ($250 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.