Design with power and create more with the best 10 design tools. Check out how these tools can help optimise your design workflow and make you more efficient.
Have you ever felt like the design process is a never-ending slog, bogged down by tedious tasks and endless revisions? Well, you're not alone. The creative process can be a challenging journey, that can sometimes feel overwhelming. But don’t worry, there’s help. With the advent of modern design tools, designers, writers, and artists can now navigate this journey with greater ease, efficiency, and creativity.
These tools can help us optimize our workflow, automate repetitive tasks, and facilitate collaboration among team members. By using the right tools, we can reduce the time and effort required to produce high-quality designs that meet our goals, leaving us more time and energy to focus on the creative aspects of our work. So, if you're ready to transform your design process from a tiresome chore to a fun exploration, let's explore some of the top design tools available today.
Number one on our list, is the great ChatGPT. ChatGPT has only been recently released, but it is already being widely used by everyone – and we mean everyone. Designers, students, teachers, writers, and people who’s just having a hard time finding the right words to write an email.
Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is an AI-powered language model that can help designers generate human-like text that matches the style and tone of their project, making it easy to communicate effectively with team members and stakeholders. It can help optimise the design process by doing exactly what you want it. You need header copies for your candle website? Just type: write a copy for a header on my website, make it lit. It is also just the start for AI generated content and with GPT-4 yet to be released, the future in this space is exciting.
The unsung hero of image compressors. TinyPNG never compromises quality and works effectively to minimise your image size. This is particularly important for website design, as large image files can slow down a website's loading speed, negatively affecting user experience and SEO. By compressing image files, TinyPNG makes it easier to improve website loading times, reduce bandwidth costs, and improve user experience. The best part? It doesn’t force you to sign up!
For those designers working in various virtual environments, Figma has become the go-to tool. It is a powerful design tool that allows teams to collaborate on projects in real-time. Figma's cloud-based platform allows multiple team members to work on the same project simultaneously, making it easy to iterate and refine designs quickly.
This versatile design tool also has a wide range of design and prototyping features that allow designers to create complex designs and interactive prototypes quickly and easily. Figma’s vector editing tools are particularly powerful, allowing designers to create and manipulate vector shapes and paths with ease. You can get UI kits, and plugins, which can help you speed up your workflow and ensure consistency across designs.
If you’re looking to do a quick and reliable audit of your site’s SEO, Screaming Frog will provide all of the data you need. Screaming Frog is a website crawler tool that can help designers optimize their website's on-page elements for SEO. It allows designers to quickly and easily analyse a website's structure, identify broken links, missing or duplicate page titles and meta descriptions, and analyse page content.
Most designers would probably have started their design journey with the Adobe Suite. It’s a set of design tools that can be used at every step of the design process. Adobe's suite of creative tools has been a staple for designers for years, providing a variety of powerful tools for design, photography, video editing, and more. Adobe Creative Suite includes Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and many more. Plus, its wide range of powerful features has seamless integration between tools. It will be interesting to see how the relationship between Adobe and Figma evolves following Adobe’s acquisition in 2022.
Canva is one of the hottest web-based tools used, and for good reason too! This user-friendly design tool allows non-designers to create professional-looking designs with ease, providing a variety of templates, graphics, and fonts to choose from. With Canva, designers can quickly create beautiful designs without needing extensive design knowledge or experience. Canva's drag-and-drop interface and pre-designed templates make it easy for designers to create custom designs quickly, allowing them to focus more on the creative aspects of their work.
If you’re like me who has a hard time translating what’s on paper to your actual computer, then Uizard can be a great help. Uizard is a design tool that uses artificial intelligence to automate the design process. With Uizard, designers can quickly and easily turn their sketches or wireframes into polished, finished designs. The tool uses machine learning algorithms to analyse a designer's sketch or wireframe, understand the design elements, and automatically generate a high-quality design that matches the designer's vision.
Writers, we’ve all been there. It’s not that we’ve ran out of words, it’s just that sometimes we need that extra push, or at least some help for a starting point. Introducing, Jasper! An AI-writing tool that can generate text quickly and easily. It can write short and long-form content, rewrite existing blogs, while remaining free of plagiarism, and many more.
Jasper can help designers maintain a consistent tone of voice throughout their designs. For example, a designer might be working on a branding project that requires a specific tone of voice. By using Jasper to generate text that follows the dictated tone of voice, designers can ensure that all the text in the design is consistent and cohesive.
Have you ever spent so many hours browsing the web for that perfect image? Well, you can save so much time if you do it yourself with Midjourney. Midjourney is an AI design tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) to generate images from text-based prompts. With Midjourney, designers can quickly and easily create custom images for their designs, without needing to have any graphic design skills or experience. It’s like magic.
Technology is a key factor in design to ensure that you are maximising personalisation features of CMS platforms or understanding the integrations that make a site work. Taking a look at the full stack is something all designers should be encouraged to do, so we recommend getting the Wappalyzer extension.
It is a browser extension that allows designers and developers to identify the technologies that power websites. It can be an incredibly useful tool for designers, as it can help them better understand how websites are built and what tools were used to create them.
The design world can be challenging and competitive space for creatives. But it’s also exciting and, full of creativity and innovation! With the right set of tools, you can design with power and unlock new levels of efficiency and creativity.
So, if you're a designer looking to streamline your workflow, consider giving some of these tools a try. You may just be surprised at how much they can help. From AI-powered writing and design tools to powerful collaboration and file management solutions. These tools are designed to help you optimise your workflow and focus on what you do best: creating amazing designs.
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