Contextual shortcut and tool finder for vector designers

An intermediate designer is working fast on a deadline and needs to switch tools quickly. They know the tool exists, they've used it before, but it's three levels deep in a panel they don't remember, and the keyboard shortcut isn't one they've memorized. They stop, dig around, lose the thread of what they were doing. This happens multiple times per session. The complaint — 'tools are a bit hard to get to while trying to work in a fast speed environment' — is a description of flow state getting broken, repeatedly, by software that doesn't adapt to how a user actually works.

This gap persists for a structural reason: keyboard shortcuts and tool locations in Illustrator and Affinity Designer are designed for the software's internal logic, not for the workflows users actually run. Customizing shortcuts exists in both apps but requires the user to already know what they want to change, and to go through a preferences dialog that is itself hard to navigate. The software vendors have no incentive to surface this prominently — a discoverable shortcut system would implicitly admit that the default layout is hard.

What's missing is a searchable, behavior-based tool finder that works the way someone thinks when they're mid-task. Not 'Pen Tool' but 'draw a curved line.' Not 'Pathfinder > Minus Front' but 'cut a shape out of another shape.' The complaints about tools being 'hidden within dropdown menus' and basic actions being impossible 'without prior knowledge' describe someone who knows what they want to do but can't translate their intent into the software's vocabulary.

This is a business because the problem recurs every time a designer encounters an unfamiliar task or switches between software versions, and because no amount of experience fully eliminates the lookup cost — even experts forget rarely-used tools. Studios onboarding junior designers face this at scale. The cost is real: every minute hunting for a tool on a billable project is either margin lost or client trust eroded.

What to build

Build a desktop overlay app for macOS and Windows that intercepts a hotkey, opens a natural-language search bar, and returns the exact tool name, panel location, and current keyboard shortcut for Illustrator or Affinity Designer — with the ability to reassign shortcuts directly from the search result without opening the app's preferences.

Where to start

Win designers who regularly switch between Illustrator and Affinity Designer on the same projects — a specific, underserved group who feel the tool-location mismatch acutely and have an active online community complaining about exactly this — by building the cross-app shortcut translation table as the first distinct feature.

The hard part

Parsing natural-language intent into tool matches requires either a manually curated synonym dictionary (fragile and expensive to maintain) or an LLM call per query (adds latency and cost at the moment the user most needs speed) — you have to pick one and it shapes the whole product.

How it makes money

One-time purchase around $29–49 with a free 30-day trial; optional annual subscription at $19/year for updates as software versions change.