Design Mode

Design Mode, at Design Mode, is a vector editing suite that runs inside After Effects, made by Jake Bartlett of Jake in Motion. You pull shapes, masks and text from a comp onto its canvas, edit them, and push the edits back to the comp.

Animated layers can be pulled too. Edits to keyframed properties land as new keyframes, and effects, expressions and parenting are preserved. Design Mode has no timeline. It reads the comp at the current time, and you still animate in After Effects.

The tools include exact position, length and angle controls for each point, Last Action for adjusting your most recent step, interactive tapers that use After Effects' native stroke tapering, live shapes that push as adjustable rigs, Pathfinder and path actions (offset, simplify, join, outline strokes), and Replicate arrays built from native Repeaters. There are rectangle, ellipse, polygon, star, line, Pen, Pencil and Text tools, five selection tools, layers and properties panels, transforms, align and distribute, solid and gradient fills and strokes, dashes, waves, blend modes, masks with feather and expansion, text controls, and shape operators such as Trim Paths, Repeater and Merge Paths. You can edit shortcuts, scale the UI, use a floating toolbar and dock three panels.

It writes standard After Effects shapes, masks and text, so a project opens for people who don't have Design Mode. The canvas and undo history are saved as you work for crash recovery.

This is V1, and the maker says to expect gaps and bugs. Properties driven by expressions can't be edited, and very large selections can slow down.

Design Mode requires After Effects 2023 or later, or 2024 or later for text editing, on Mac or Windows. It installs as a .zxp extension and needs an internet connection to activate and at least every 30 days after that.

Pricing: Design Mode is a one-time purchase with no subscription. The launch price is $48 and the full price is $58. A license covers two machines at once and includes free V1 updates, with a 7-day refund. Checked November 12, 2026 at https://www.jakeinmotion.com/design-mode.