In early summer, there was already some heat in the air. The pleasure of the company’s young designers has shifted from drinking “happy tea” in groups to eating tile-shaped ice cream. Upon inquiry, I learned that this ice cream is called “Zhong Xue Gao”.

To prove my acceptance of youth culture, I immediately decided to buy one from the convenience store downstairs. The cashier told me that the ice cream was so red that the whole Internet was growing grass for it. The light milk flavor in your hand is more basic, suggest to try velvet cocoa, strawberry white chocolate and other advanced flavors; As for the 66 yuan Ecuadorian pink diamond on Tmall, it is limited, just take a look…

I looked around the counter near the cash register and couldn’t help myself: Aren’t young people eating cutedo, DQ, Haagen-Dazs?

A: to harm! This is the age of domestic light ah!

You should know that about five or six years ago, when the commercial complex model was in full bloom in China, every complex was proud of being able to recruit international brands like Haagen-Dazs and DQ. At that time, domestic ice cream brands in supermarkets were mostly owned by Mengniu and Yili, so consumers had few choices.

To be honest, I consider myself a bit of a duller palate, but as a designer, I’m pretty picky. In recent years, the counter-attack of various domestic products, the most intuitive can be seen is that the design level and promotion strategy has been significantly improved. And another important reason, just as the cashier in the company said, under the background of “internal circulation”, the self-improvement of domestic products has become a consensus of the whole society.

In fact, “internal circulation” is a word commonly used in economic articles. The core meaning is that in the international situation where the confrontation between China and the United States is becoming more and more clear and other countries are taking sides, domestic products need to make breakthroughs and take the place of foreign products to shoulder more responsibilities for driving the economy.

Unfortunately, for us designers, the hardware and software products in daily use are almost all products of European and American giants. Adobe, which is well known in the design circle, entered China around 1995. At the beginning, there were few products, only Ps, Ai, Pr and other very limited products. Two decades later, Adobe’s “family bucket” has grown to more than a dozen products and has a near-monopoly on the domestic digital design market. Even though there are some competitive products, such as Coraldraw, Affinity, Sketch, Figma and so on, they are still foreign products. The Chinese are still very limited in the field of design tools.

However, things are getting better. For example, two high-quality domestic rapid prototyping tools mockPlus and Mockingbot were born in 2014, which strongly challenged Axure, the originator of foreign prototyping tools. Until today, these two domestic tools still do not stop iteration and progress, and the share continues to rise.

In fact, with the rapid development of the Domestic Internet industry, the technical level of the Domestic Internet has roughly belonged to the same echelon as the United States, and Europe, Japan and South Korea and other established developed countries are obviously left behind. Short video concepts and algorithms like Tiktok, for example, have led the world, forcing giants like Facebook and Google to reverse-copy.

Therefore, it is not necessary to be just a newcomer to the industry, even if there is a certain degree of seniority of the designer might as well change the way of thinking. If you still insist that “the moon abroad is round”, it is inevitable to be a little complacent.

For the design tool field, I really have some personal experience. Last year, due to the pandemic, the company’s international business was scaled back, and the team decided to move the design delivery platform from Zeplin to the domestic platform. After comprehensive factors, we choose the old domestic manufacturer – Copy.

First of all, under the support of the domestic CDN server, the pages of the copycat can be opened in seconds, and the efficiency is greatly improved; What’s more, Copyer’s collaboration platform is free for teams of less than 100 people. Compared with Zeplin, it has almost no loss of functions…… For us so not small, money is not easy to the company, really can be used to describe the “brief encounter”!

Recently, we found out that The prototype tool “Muke RP” is also completely free! After a brief trial run, the lightweight design and delivery felt perfectly fine, and there were even some very clever innovations in functionality. Although the group has not considered transferring the prototype and wireframing design to copyer RP, the overall performance of this domestic design platform has far exceeded my expectation.

In fact, during the process of platform conversion, I was always worried: will using domestic products make other designers feel Low? As it turned out, those fears were overblown. After all, a good designer does not use a specific tool to make a good design, but a good designer knows what is good and what is good, so it doesn’t matter if they use any tool to achieve it.

Of course, from replace to truly surpass is actually a very long process. After all, so many foreign brands have undergone years of improvement and continuous evolution. Adobe has been around for more than 30 years, and the brand itself seems to represent the evolution of the digital design industry. Domestic goods in addition to efforts to survive the first wave of waves and stand firm, but also should have to promote the industry, the consciousness of creating history – this requires more responsibility and efforts of the people.

“Internal circulation” may be the inflection point of the development of the whole domestic brand. If in this period really hard work, continue to obtain user recognition, the potential behind will be huge. As a designer or consumer, we also need to broaden our horizons, break stereotypes and embrace the new trends of The Times.

With the gradual improvement of domestic self-developed products, I set a small goal for myself in 2021, trying to completely replace the existing workflow with domestic products. This may be a difficult task, but I am still full of confidence, after all, the progress of domestic products is obvious to all. In the design circle, the real “home-made self-improvement” day will not wait too long.