Qt Design Studio 2.2 Released

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Design Studio 2.2.

Qt Design Studio is a UI design and development tool that enables designers and developers to rapidly prototype and develop complex UIs. Both designers and developers use Qt Design Studio which makes collaboration between the two a lot simpler and more streamlined. To get an impression, you should watch this video.

For detailed information about Qt Design Studio, visit the online documentation page.

Introducing support for Qt 6.2 and Qt 5.15

From a purely technical perspective, the largest change in Qt Design Studio 2.2 is the full support for Qt 6.2. Qt Design Studio itself is now also built using Qt 6.2. We also support Qt 5.15 based projects in parallel.

Therefore when creating a new project the user has to choose either Qt 5 or Qt 6. Qt Design Studio will use the Qt 5 or Qt 6 runtime depending on this choice in the wizard. If you want to create a project that is compatible with both Qt 5 and Qt 6, you have to choose Qt 5 and you can later change the Qt version used to test a Qt 6 based version. While the 2D parts of Qt Quick are mostly compatible, the 3D features of Qt Quick 3D are incompatible.

To help convert projects from Qt 5 to Qt 6, we created a porting guide that explains the main differences and the steps you have to take to get an existing project to work with Qt 6.

New Qt Quick 3D features in Qt 6.2

Many features were added to QtQuick3D in Qt 6. One of the most noteworthy features is the support for particle systems. In Qt Design Studio 2.2 it is now possible to create advanced particle systems purely from the UI, by dragging and dropping from the Library and tweaking the properties using the Properties view.
This enables the users of Qt Design Studio 2.2 to create a large variety of different effects using particles, like fire, explosions, or rain.

These effects are a great way to make the 3D parts of an application stand out. Check out this blog post to learn more about what is possible with particle systems or checkout the documentation.
Other features from Qt Quick 3D that are now available in Qt Design Studio are Mesh Morphing,  Instanced Rendering, and Skeletal Animations. 


On this Screenshot, you can see a skeletal animation imported to Qt Design Studio. This way complex skeletal animations can be created in the tool of choice, while it is still possible to control the timing of the animation using the timeline in Qt Design Studio.


Qt Design Studio 2.2 comes with a powerful feature set for designing and animating complex 3D scenes and 3D-based user interfaces. You can use all the features like States and Timelines together with Qt Quick 3D and easily mix 2D and 3D. To learn more about how to use Qt Quick 3D in Qt Design Studio refer to the documentation.

The most visible change in the 2D-related parts of Qt Design Studio 2.2 is the overhaul of the Properties view. The Properties view now comes with a completely new layout and important elements like the color picker have been fully redesigned. In particular, the arrangement and prioritization of the elements have been greatly revised. Properties that are more important or more frequently used are now arranged at the top and easy to spot. The color picker and editor were moved into a dialog to save space in the Properties view.

Last but not least, Qt Design Studio 2.2 comes with a downloadable example that shows how to integrate a .qmlproject (a QML project created by Qt Design Studio) with the actual C++ application. To make this as easy as possible, Qt Design Studio 2.2 has the functionality to create .qrc files for the C++ project from the Design Studio project.

Getting Started

As with the previous versions, Qt Design Studio 2.2 is also available as a free community version and is now part of the online installer. The free version lacks the Photoshop, Sketch and Figma bridges, that are included in the paid version.

The commercial Qt Design Studio 2.2  is available under Tools > Qt Design Studio 2.2.0 in the online installer. 

You can find the latest online documentation for Qt Design Studio 2.2 here. The documentation is also available from inside Qt Design Studio.

For Qt Design Studio 2.2 we updated the tutorials, included in the documentation.

The welcome page of Qt Design Studio contains examples and links to video tutorials to help you get started.

Of course Qt Design Studio contains many more  bug fixes and small improvements. Please check the change log for more details.

Please post issues you find or suggestions you have in our bug tracker.