7 Design Tools for Productivity Boost

When it comes to graphic design, it can be safely said that if you don’t know your tools, you will not last long in this field. While creativity and vision are two of the most valuable attributes for any designer, if you aren’t familiar with the latest tools you will not be able to achieve the designs you want.

With that being said, we’ve put together a list of five productive design tools that every designer should master before embarking on any projects. These tools have been tested in the field and are guaranteed to boost your productivity.

1. Adobe Photoshop

We might as well start with the basics. Mastering Adobe Photoshop should be the very first thing on any designer’s list.  Photoshop allows designers to create website templates, new or modified graphics and also to edit pictures. These features make Photoshop an invaluable tool. For the technically inclined, some of the advanced features of this software include layering, color correction and more.

2. Adobe Illustrator

What you can’t do with Photoshop, you can easily do with Illustrator. This is the bread and butter for designers today and an absolute must when it comes to boosting graphic design productivity. Using Adobe Illustrator, you can tackle large-scale complex projects that rely heavily on cool nifty graphics, make amazing graphical reports and create logos.

3. Adobe Fireworks

If you are a web designer than you should already be using this tool. It’s easy to use and since its release it has become the primary tool for web design. Fireworks allows users to work with a variety of images, giving them a blend of vector and bitmap tools, safe file import options and built-in prototyping options. Designers can use the full range of options for creating beautiful designs.

4.  Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign is a versatile page designing and publishing application. It gives graphic designers complete control over graphic design, whether its print or digital. Its close integration with Flash Professional has helped simplify making web versions of documents and its latest versions help create e-books and adapt content for tablets. InDesign has simplified exporting and supporting various image files, adjusting resolution and image sizes, and tagging audio and video files for e-publishing.

 5. Shrink-O-Matic

Creating, modifying and altering images are some of the tasks that come as second nature to designers. Shrink-O-Matic is a great tool that enables resizing an image as you see fit. This tool has an extremely simple UI and can handle many of the popular image formats such as GIFs, JPEGs and PNGs.

 6. Blender

If you ever find yourself working on 3D animation projects, this should be the first design tool that you get your hands on. It has a number of features that helps designers create breathtaking 3D animations. By default, the software comes with a node-based compositor, stimulation tools, textures and much more. Blender has a very user friendly UI and best of all, it’s completely free!

7. Dropbox

Dropbox may not be a graphic design tool but nevertheless, almost every designer uses it. This cloud-based data storage service can sync multiple hard drives at multiple locations. This makes it easy for designers to carry their work around. It saves time and time is money.

We hope that you will find the above tools to be useful and beneficial to you. There are dozens more to list, however for new and experienced designers these design tools will provide a multitude of help.

Tags: Freelance Graphic Designer, Graphic Design Productivity, Graphic Design Tools, Productive Design Tools

Related Posts

• 10 Cool iPad Apps for Web Designers
• 20 Free and Useful Adobe Illustrator Tutorials
• 10 Silly Mistakes Logo Designers make
• Web Design Submission Guidelines
• Should Graphic Designers Learn CSS?