The working conditions for domestic designers have undergone a qualitative shift compared to ten years ago: in the past, finding assets required sifting through material websites for hours, there were constant worries about font copyright issues, and AI tools were an unknown concept. Today, while there are more choices than ever for these needs, solving "all requirements on a single platform" remains difficult—either the tools are good but resources are scarce, or the community is active but the tools lack professionalism.
Alibaba Duiyou (d.design) attempts to solve this fragmentation by integrating design tools, design resources, and a designer community, backed by Alibaba’s extensive accumulation of design assets and AI technical capabilities in e-commerce, content, and internet products over the years.
What is Alibaba Duiyou?
Duiyou (d.design) is an open comprehensive platform under Alibaba targeting designers, covering UI/UX designers, visual designers, brand designers, illustrators, and other creative professionals. The platform’s core consists of three parts: AI-driven design tools, a high-quality design resource library, and a designer exchange community.
The name "Duiyou" has a practical meaning—"Dui" (stack) implies piling up or accumulating, suggesting that designers can stack their inspiration, assets, and tools here; "You" (friend) reflects the community attribute, indicating it is not just a tool platform but also a place for designers to communicate with each other.
The platform’s special advantage comes from its background: Alibaba’s e-commerce design, new retail design, and internet product design have numerous mature cases and methodologies. These accumulated insights are exported through Duiyou, providing domestic designers with a direct reference source they can draw upon.
Core Features in Detail
AI Image Generation
Duiyou’s AI text-to-image function is based on Alibaba’s Tongyi series of large models, supporting Chinese and English prompt input. The generated images can be used for scenarios such as UI illustrations, design accompaniment images, scene concept art, product packaging visual references, and brand storyboards.
Unlike many image generation tools that perform best with English prompts, Duiyou’s Chinese semantic understanding is stable for Chinese creative descriptions. There is no need to translate Chinese ideas into English before inputting them; describing something directly in Chinese, such as "a girl wearing modern Hanfu standing on a futuristic city street, neon lights, cyberpunk style," will generate the corresponding image.
The generation styles cover multiple directions: realistic photography, illustration/cartoon, 3D rendering, watercolor hand-drawn, commercial posters, etc. The generation direction can be controlled via style tags or prompt keywords.
AI-generated images can serve as design inspiration references or directly as accompaniment assets for design drafts.
AI-Assisted Image Processing Tools
In addition to text-to-image, Duiyou integrates several AI image processing functions frequently used in actual design work:
AI Smart Cutout: Upload an image, and the AI automatically identifies the subject and background, extracting the subject with one click. It supports scenarios such as portrait cutouts, product cutouts, and object cutouts, generating PNG files with transparent backgrounds. The quality of the cutout affects the final effect of composite designs; AI smart cutout is faster than manual operation, with significant efficiency advantages in batch processing scenarios.
AI Background Generation: Automatically generates matching background environments for existing product or portrait images. E-commerce product images often require changing backgrounds to display different scenes; AI background generation can quickly produce multiple background options without the need for specialized shooting or manual compositing for each scene.
AI Image Removal: Mark areas in an image that need to be removed, and the AI intelligently fills them in to eliminate distracting elements. This is useful for removing extra people from backgrounds, deleting watermark areas from own-content images, or cleaning up clutter on product images.
AI Image Upscaling: Increases image resolution. When enlarging small images, the AI supplements details rather than using simple interpolation, ensuring that clarity does not drop significantly after enlargement. This is suitable for scenarios where web slicing requires large-size versions.
Design Resource Library
This section is a major practical driver for many designers. The quality and richness of the resource library directly impact design work efficiency:
Image Assets: High-quality images covering commercial scenarios, with clear licensing instructions. Commercially usable images are marked as such, so designers do not need to worry about copyright issues. Categories are detailed, allowing filtering by scenario, industry, color tone, style, and other dimensions.
Vector Icon Library: A vast number of vector icons covering common UI functional icons, industry icons, brand icons, etc. SVG formats can be downloaded directly; colors and sizes can be adjusted without loss of quality, allowing direct use in design files and saving the time spent drawing icons manually.
UI Components and Design Specifications: Organizes UI component libraries for common platforms (iOS, Android, Web). Components that comply with design specifications can be cited directly to ensure consistency of design drafts across different platforms. References to Alibaba’s internal design specifications (such as Ant Design-related content) provide valuable reference for designers working on B-end product design.
Font Resources: Chinese fonts have long been a headache for designers; many aesthetically pleasing Chinese fonts on the market are paid, and commercial licensing is complex. Duiyou has compiled a batch of commercially usable Chinese fonts with clear licensing instructions, eliminating the need to separately verify copyright before use.
Templates: PPT templates, Banner templates, social media image templates, etc. In scenarios requiring rapid output, modifying based on templates is faster than starting from scratch, reducing time costs.
Designer Community and Inspiration
The community section consists of three parts:
Portfolio Display: Designers publish their work to receive community feedback and gain exposure. Backed by Alibaba, Duiyou’s exposure has platform endorsement, and excellent works have the opportunity to receive more attention. A certain proportion of designers from domestic internet companies are active on Duiyou, so the style of works here leans toward internet product design and commercial design, differing from the boutique UI display style of Dribbble.
Inspiration Collection: Similar to the collection function of Huaban, it allows saving good designs, color schemes, and layouts seen online to build a personal inspiration library for future reference.
Design News: Content such as industry dynamics, design trend analysis, and tool tutorials helps designers keep up with industry changes and understand current design directions.
Comparison with Similar Platforms
vs Zcool (Zhuoku): Zcool is the largest designer community in China, with a large number of works, a massive designer base, and a mature community atmosphere, featuring many high-quality works in graphic design, brand design, and illustration. Its tool functions are relatively weak, focusing mainly on display and communication. Duiyou has more complete AI tools and resource libraries, while Zcool has a larger community scale and activity level; their positioning differs but partially overlaps.
vs Huaban: Huaban’s core is "collection"—gathering good things seen online to build a personal inspiration library. This scenario is handled with great focus and usability. Its tool and resource functions are very weak, almost non-existent. Duiyou is a comprehensive entity of tools + resources + community, while Huaban only does inspiration collection; the two can be used in conjunction.
vs Dribbble: Dribbble is a global portfolio platform for designers, focusing on boutique UI/interaction design with a strong international atmosphere and high quality standards. It is an important channel for designers to seek employment and build personal brands. The main content is in English, limiting the exposure of domestic designers’ works. Duiyou targets the domestic market, with rich Chinese content that better fits the usage scenarios of domestic internet design.
vs Figma Community: Figma Community mainly provides design files that can be opened and used directly in Figma, which is extremely practical for Figma users—component libraries, icon sets, and design systems can be reused directly. The limitation is that they can only be used within Figma. Duiyou’s resources are cross-software compatible but do not integrate as deeply with tools as Figma Community does.
vs Canva: Canva is a design tool for non-professional users, featuring rich templates and drag-and-drop functionality that requires almost no design foundation. For professional designers, the functions are too limited, lacking fine-grained control. Duiyou targets professional designers and is not a simplified tool; their user groups do not overlap.
vs Adobe Stock + Behance: Adobe’s Stock provides image assets, while Behance is a design portfolio community. Together with Adobe Creative Cloud tools, they form a complete ecosystem. However, the price is high (Creative Cloud subscription fees are expensive), and the Adobe ecosystem is more suitable for users deeply dependent on tools like PS/AI/AE. Duiyou offers larger free quotas, making it suitable for designers not within the Adobe system.
Who is Alibaba Duiyou For?
UI/UX Designers of Domestic Internet Products: Those who frequently need to reference design trends of domestic internet products and understand Alibaba’s design specifications and methodologies will find Duiyou to be a direct source of first-hand resources.
E-commerce Designers and Brand Visual Designers: Duiyou has deep accumulation in e-commerce visual resources. References and asset resources for scenarios such as e-commerce Banners, event posters, and detail page illustrations are concentrated here, saving time spent searching for assets everywhere.
Small and Medium Teams Needing Rapid Content Production: With high design demand but limited professional designer manpower, AI tools help improve efficiency—AI cutout is ten times faster than manual cutout, AI background generation saves shooting costs, and AI text-to-image provides accompaniment assets.
Design Students and Junior Designers: Referencing excellent works, learning design specifications, and downloading practice assets, Duiyou’s resources are practically helpful for design learning, and the free quota is sufficient for the learning stage.
Designers Interested in Alibaba’s Design Methodology: Alibaba’s design methodology and the Ant Design system have a wide impact in the field of B-end product design. Understanding these accumulations through Duiyou provides valuable reference for those working on B-end product design.
Usage Suggestions
Logging in is required to download resources and use AI tools. You can authorize login directly using Alibaba ecosystem accounts (Taobao, Alipay) without separate registration.
Free quotas for different functions are calculated separately. It is recommended to first judge which function’s quota is most important based on your highest-frequency needs and prioritize its use.
When using AI-generated images as design assets, it is recommended to pay attention to the copyright applicability of the generated content and confirm the platform’s copyright terms before use in commercial projects.
Pricing
Duiyou has a free version; basic functions and resource browsing do not require payment. AI tools have daily free quotas. Downloading some high-quality resources and unlimited AI usage requires upgrading to a membership (points-based or monthly). Specific pricing is subject to the official website and will adjust with feature iterations.
For designers with continuous design work needs, Duiyou’s comprehensive tool + resource + community one-stop feature saves the time cost of switching between multiple platforms. The resource quality assurance brought by its Alibaba background and continuous technical investment make it one of the designer platforms worth long-term use.