Legacy Designer Renamed to Classic Designer

In February, we announced the new Visual Design Studio and relabeled our existing guide designer as the Legacy Designer. The decision to promote the new Visual Designer was made to modernize our guide architecture and provide a low-code environment to make guide building more accessible to all kinds of users.

Since this announcement, we’ve received a lot of questions about support for each guide-building experience and feedback from users who still prefer the original designer. Today we want to clarify the support plan for your guide-design options and share our updated plan.

As of today, the Legacy Designer has been renamed to Classic Designer.

In our naming discussions, “legacy” had a nice ring to it. It clearly distinguished between the two design experiences and classified one as ‘old’ and the other as ‘new.’ But this naming decision had the unintended consequence of suggesting an imminent sunset for the Classic Designer. To clarify, there is no active project to sunset or retire the Classic Designer.

Classic Designer will remain available to all users indefinitely.

Based on your feedback, we recognize there are unique needs and certain workflows that many users prefer to address with the Classic Designer, so it will remain available to all users indefinitely. Furthermore, Classic guides will require the Classic Designer for guide management or updates, so the Classic Designer will continue to be an important tool for many customers. To clarify our intention, there is no timeline, initiative, or effort to sunset the Classic Designer.

While new development will focus on improving the Visual Designer, Classic Guides will be supported in new contexts like Resource Center.

Taking a page from the Basecamp playbook, the Classic Designer will remain available in its current form for as long as people need it. If it breaks, we will fix it, but our new development will be focused on the Visual Designer and the new building-block guide architecture. This low-code design environment provides greater scalability, improved performance, and better security options for all kinds of users, regardless of their technical skill level.

At the same time, we want users of the Classic Designer to benefit when the new architecture enhances areas of the product outside the designer. A key example is the new Resource Center—although this new, more flexible widget is built on the building-block framework, we have designed it so that Classic Designer guides can be published in the new Resource Center.

Reference this help article to learn more about using Visual Design Studio vs Classic Designer.