What was Framer X?

Founded in 2013, Framer was a high-fidelity and prototyping tool that helped design teams create powerful, interactive prototypes quickly.

At first, Framer [classic] relied fairly heavily on code, which posed a pretty big challenge for designers with zero code experience.

Throughout 2017 and 2018, Framer worked heavily on both improving its product and making it more accessible to designers who didn’t know how to code, which lead to the launch of Framer X in 2018.

Framer X introduced two important changes to the app:

• Designers could now design and build a full-blown prototype without ever touching a single line on code.

• For those who were familiar with code, though, Framer switched to React and introduced real smart components to the prototype.

With Framer X, the company kept slowly but steadily growing till 2021, when something changed.

What happened to Framer X?

In 2021, Framer’s growth stalled. Framer’s founders had to make an important decision on the future of the company. The tool they had believed in didn’t appeal to a big enough market, so they had to choose between stallation and pivoting.

They idea behind the pivot is simple: could the prototyping tool they had developed actually build production sites? Could Framer bridge the gap between Figma and Webflow? Could designers actually turn their ideas into real websites?

Framer launched its website builder in May 2022, and the growth of the tool skyrocketed! Adoption between design teams spread like wildfire, leading to multiple big names in the industry - like Perplexity, Dribbble, and Zapier - to use Framer for their marketing site and also an incredible $27M Series C funding round.

With this new mission in mind, Framer has now become a very advanced website builder, positioning itself as a potential thread to much bigger, more established companies in the space.

While still early, Framer is off to an incredible journey.

Thanks for reading.

• Luca