Tools & Resources I Use Every Day as a Designer — Part Two: Software & Apps

I’m always fascinated to see where and how other people work and I wanted to share my personal set up, focusing on the tools & resources I use every day as a designer. I recently posted part one on hardware I use as a designer and today I am featuring the software and apps I use on a daily basis.

Software

DESIGN / CODE

• Adobe Creative Cloud — Mainly Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, InDesign, Lightroom, Audition
• FontExplorer X Pro — Font management.
• GarageBand — Podcast editing
• CyberDuck — FTP Client.
• ColorSchemer Studio 2 — Great colour scheme creator & colour tool.

WEB / SOCIAL

• Slack — Team chat
• Tweetdeck — Desktop + mobile Twitter client.
• Chrome — My browser of choice. Plugins include Buffer, Ninja, Panda, FireShot, Honey, Notion, Bookmark OS, Video Speed Controller

MUSIC

• Spotify — My music player of choice. I subscribe to their Premium subscription so I can sync & listen to the music on my iPhone too. I use the iPhone Spotify Remote App to change songs from wherever I am.

BUSINESS / PRODUCTIVITY

• Skype — International phone calls and meetings.
• Zoom — Video conference calls
• Calend.ly — Book meetings with me online
• TextExpander — Saves me from re-writing commonly used phrases & emails. See how to use TextExpander to conquer email.
• Alfred — Launches my software & searches with speed. Super productive. I use the shortcut key Cmd+E.
• Google Suite — Docs, Sheets and Drive
• Apple Time Machine — Backs up my files to external hard drives.

Web Apps & Services

• Google Apps — Handles my email (10 reasons you should try out Gmail), docs & syncs my calendar with my computers and iPhone.
• Notion — To do lists & note taking on steroids.
• DropBox — In the cloud file sharing & storing. Get 32Gb free with this link.
• PayPal — Invoicing & payments.
• Shutterstock — My preference in stock imagery.
• FreshBooks — Invoicing
• MoonClerk — Payment processing

Hosting

• Media Temple — Where I host my website. I recommend BlueHost for smaller business though.

Have any other recommended software or apps or designers?