Some call Fable, “Figma for motion” – others call us, “Canva for creative pros.” Figma showed us that incredible products can be built together on the web. Canva showed us that anyone can design. At Fable, we are showing that teams can ship meaningful creative content under one roof.

But… the creative world is …different now.

The past 18 months have marked a tectonic shift in content creation. AI tools are everywhere, generative content is nearing the point of realism, and anyone with a keyboard can dream up a new asset with a few keystrokes. Whether optimistic or skeptical, this is our world.

At Fable, we’ve been carefully observing, planning, and building what has been missing amidst all the buzz. Because while creating assets has never been easier, what you do with the assets matters. It’s workflows that assemble stories, and it’s designers who direct the cameras. For over five years, we've been defining the next generation of creative software, and in the AI era, there has been one critical missing piece: control.

Introducing Prism: How designers control generative AI (now available to everyone!)

Why Prism matters

It’s been crucial for us to get AI + Fable right.

As designers ourselves, observing this generative world unfold and talking with our community every day has been a ride of excitement, concern, and everything in between. We began using terms like "morse code" and "telephone" to describe what it is like to “kind of, sometimes, maybe” get the result we wanted with text – right? The back-and-forth, the prompting, the hallucinations, and the interpretation skills all feel unnatural to create visual work.

We knew Fable’s approach to Gen-AI had to be rooted in control: A visual interface for visual work, where you get to show, not tell, and where you get to describe motion, with actual motion. Because what’s in your mind’s eye is hard to put into words, and at the end of the day, a more powerful camera is just another input to a creative process that demands human direction.

With Prism, our goal is to empower, not replace designers. We’ve made intentional design choices to put Prism’s “AI Lenses” within reach when you need them, but easy to hide when you don’t. And you – the director – get to control how AI fits into your workflow to help you create and ship real work end-to-end.

For example: Use Prism at the start of your workflow to quickly generate an asset that you then edit and animate with Fable’s other tools. Or, use Prism in the middle – perhaps you drop in a video from Sora and then layer on titles and effects in Fable. Or, use Prism at the end of the workflow – perhaps you’re a seasoned motion designer and quickly want to iterate on your work in 3D, anime, or claymation (a process that would otherwise take days by hand). It’s this level of control, in addition to the inline text prompter, sliders, and animation tools that puts the control back in the hands of the designer.

The result is a new chapter for generative creativity and a true design partnership with AI. But critically, achieving this level of design-led control with Prism wouldn’t be possible without the foundations of Fable.

How we got here: Workflows

Over five years ago, we embarked on a mission to become the modern creative studio: The platform that teams adopt right alongside Figma to ship incredible creative content together.

And we began with a belief that we still hold close today: that the future of creative software has to be centered on motion.

A quick note: Some folk use terms like video editing, motion graphics, motion design, and animation interchangeably. To us, it's all simply "motion" – an engaging, dynamic storytelling format suitable for the web, social media, TV, a Times Square billboard… the list goes on.

But while motion design is ever more a necessity, designing in motion remains incredibly difficult. Incumbent tools require a PhD, powerful hardware to run, and even for pros – a patchwork of plugins and adjacent tools to get work done.

So, to design the future of creative software, we had to tackle this complexity head-on: We needed to build a powerful, robust, motion engine – and make it easy to use – and ensure it could run in a browser. Let’s go.

It's been an incredible challenge. I cannot begin to describe the technical obstacles we've faced making this vision a reality (they each should probably get their own post one day). And I'm immensely proud of our team for their grit and determination over the years – It simply takes this amount of time to build a pro-grade creative platform on the web.

Today, Fable is powered by our in-house, highly-capable, low-level vector and raster engine. You can upload videos, images, SVGs, and audio files. There’s a native vector engine, text tools, pen tools, path tools, and a library of rich and diverse effects. There’s a pro-grade timeline with inline groups (we got you AE folk). There are parenting controls, nulls, masks, anchors, compound paths, easing curves, and every property is keyframeable… There’s even a particle engine in there… Projects can be exported with various codec options, for the web, and even to Lottie.

It’s truly a production-grade, end-to-end creative workflow. Wild stuff.

How we got here: Systems

But to truly define a creative platform for the next 30 years, we also knew we had to solve the chaos.

While we were building Fable, our world quickly became remote, and collaboration became ever more important. We knew that collaboration had to be part of the solution.

Thanks to Figma, product design is now cohesive, but motion design is chaos. Every day, we heard from teams how the status quo is somehow still a cobbled-together workflow of offline and online apps that can’t talk to each other, of multiple (often expensive) licenses, and of people trying their darndest to work together, but having to choose volume or consistency.

With Fable, creative teams can bring cohesion and consistency to their organizations. Workspaces, inline commenting and review, reusable components, and shared libraries make up a Motion Design System – allowing designers, non-designers, and stakeholders to all be part of the narrative and ship faster.

For us, a deep creative toolkit plus a motion design system is all table stakes to ensure designers have what they need to get real work done together. And now with Prism, we’re lowering the floors and raising the ceilings of what’s possible with an all-in-one platform for the future of work.

What’s next

Today, designers of any skill are using Fable to design and animate incredible production-level content on the web. And the world’s most design-forward brands are using Fable to modernize their creative workflows and build cohesion across the organization. However, even though we’ve spent over five years building Fable, we've only realized 1% of our vision.

We plan to continue to expand and deep control over generative AI with production workflows that empower designers as directors. The result is a new chapter for creativity and a true design partnership with AI.

We will also deepen our investment in collaboration and design systems to help teams and organizations of any size scale meaningful content with cohesion and consistency.

I’ve truly never been more inspired by the future we’re building at Fable. We look forward to welcoming you to the community and helping you ship incredible creative work.

Start creating with Fable for free, and join our passionate design community on Discord for tips and real-time support from our team.