Napkin AI tool
Struggling making visuals for your workflows?
Engineers must be up to date with new ideas, technologies, tools, and more. It’s part of our job and continuous learning.
Today, I write about Napkin AI (napkin.ai), an AI tool I’ve been using for the last 3 months.
⚠️ Disclaimer: This post is not an advertisement and I’m not getting paid by that company. I’m just sharing my own experience with this free tool which might be worth knowing for all of you.
What is it about?
The motto of the company is:
Napkin turns your text into visuals so sharing your ideas is quick and effective.
Basically, you write a text and by clicking on the lightning icon ⚡️ the AI will do its magic proposing a visual representation of the text. Actually, it proposes multiple visual representations for you to choose and, from each, you can tune it up with different transparencies, changing forms, and colors.
The AI tool not only copy/paste the text and sits it together with some visuals and icons but interprets (a bit) the meaning of the text to offer you a visual that could make sense.
I’ve used this tool to generate some visuals to illustrate ideas in my work and in this newsletter. You can find some of them on these posts 👇🏻
My thoughts about the tool
It’s good to represent workflows. The majority of the visual suggestions are about flows.
For representing an idea in a visual way, it’s not the best tool.
The tool is really good in the UX aspect because it makes it super intuitive and fast to have a decent visual representation.
At first, I was really impressed by the tool and how easy it was to create something nice.
After several uses, you realize that the tool proposes the same visuals many times (the lighthouse, the cone, and more) and you can find a few real differences.
In summary, this is a tool I still use for having visual representations of sequences, steps, and workflows. Another tool to have in our (already loaded) belts.
Did you use it as well? what are your thoughts about it?
Any similar tool you have? Feel free to reply to this email or write it in the comments, I would love to hear about more similar tools.
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𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘦𝘯𝘫𝘰𝘺𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘵, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘤𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘦 💜. 𝘐𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘴!
𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘵 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴, ♻️ 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘵.
I also use Napkin in some of my posts. I think it’s good at summarizing and highlighting ideas like all AI do. But after 2~3 times it starts to feel a little repetitive. I think it’s good in only specific patterns now. Might need to wait for more visual types (as I know it’s expanding now) to have more use cases!
I came here to comment on Napkin and now I am really looking forward to use tldraw, damn it!