7 essential tools every designer should have in 2018
If you are a web designer, a major chunk of your time would be spent on creating designs, graphics, websites, and logos. With so much to do in a limited period of time, it is natural to look for ways that get more stuff done in lesser time. Thanks to advancing technology that there is a myriad of tools that offer multiple functionalities to make the entire process of designing a bit easier for you.
Being a good designer is not just about having creative ideas and imagination but also the right tools to execute them into reality. Here is a list of tools that would help designers simplify work and communicate their ideas to others without much effort. Let’s take a look at these tools:
ProofHub is a proofing and project management software that designers would absolutely fall in love with. It provides a central place where designers can discuss their creative stuff, draft framework of the design, get feedback, and make changes in designs. A tool like ProofHub eliminates the constant email-volleyballing happening between designers and clients by simplifying the approval process and saving them a lot of time. Moreover, it comes equipped with various markup tools to easily highlight sections and mark annotations on the file to ensure fewer revision cycles. With diverse functionalities and features, this tool should be on every designer’s list.2.
The web design landscape might be changing constantly but Photoshop has stood the test of time successfully. It is an extremely powerful program to take your creative style into the digital world with absolute confidence. Photoshop comes loaded with features, options, tools, and settings to create customized designs and graphics. It comes with a user-friendly interface that is appropriate for beginners as well as professional graphic designers. Since 1988, Photoshop has emerged as a name to reckon with in the graphic designing industry.
Avocode is a great tool for the front-end designers that boasts large clientele like that of Phillips, Intel, Viacom to name a few. It encourages the automatic generation of code pieces for exported pictures apart from seamlessly facilitating the process of transition from visuals to code. Avocode is filled with impressive features such as color conversion, code output optimization, retina graphics, CSS conversion, and preserves everything crafted in Sketch and Photoshop.
Millions of designers and artists use Illustrator to create everything from web icons, product packaging to book illustrations and billboards. Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based application, so it can easily scaled-down for mobile screens and up to billboard size. It offers some exciting features like quick document creation, a wide range of fonts, stylish sets of text, stability enhancements that ensure a great user-experience for designers. Illustrator is always getting better with new features rolling out regularly.
Antetype is a dedicated UX-based design app made by skilled designers for other designers all over the world. It saves you a lot of time creating and optimizing high-fidelity detailed UI design prototypes without much effort. Antetype has a responsive layout that saves a lot of precious time and a widget library with 400+ pre-designed widgets that can skyrocket your productivity. It also supports hierarchical nesting to support you creating complex UI designs. Antetype’s resolution independence lets you design on Retina Macs and export the assets for HiDPI usage.
Selecting the right color for a design is quite a challenge and is something that takes a lot of time for every designer. Coolors is a super-fast color scheme generator that allows you to browse great color schemes and palettes shared by other creatives. With this amazing tool, you can create, save, and share perfect palettes in a matter of few seconds. Customize your colors precisely by adjusting temperature, hue, saturation, brightness and more. Moreover, you can export your palettes in several handy formats like PNG, PDF, SCSS, SVG and copy the permanent URLs with a click.
It won’t be wrong to say that tons of people use Pixlr as a free Photoshop alternative because it offers convenient photo creation and provides functionalities offered by paid-photo programs. With this suite of image editors, you can use sophisticated editing paraphernalia regardless of the device being used by them. What makes Pixlr stand out from the others on the list is its simplicity. From advanced designers to someone who is a novice, it is something that anyone can use for creating and editing purposes.
Web designing is exciting and challenging at the same time. With right tools, you can improve the way you design, supercharge your creativity, and boost your design output. I hope these tools are of some help to you. Which tools do you use to make the process of designing simpler and comfortable? Let us know in the comments section.
Author Bio:
Vartika Kashyap is the Marketing Manager at ProofHub and has been one of the LinkedIn Top Voices in 2017. Her articles are inspired by office situations and work-related events. She likes to write about productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, entrepreneurship among others and contributing to a better workplace is what makes her click.
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