As a graphic designer or small business owner, you probably use various websites and apps to help with the day to day running of your business!
Whether you work alone or manage a team, today, we will highlight 20 essential websites/apps that you can use to increase your creativity and productivity. Some are free, while many offer free trials so you can test it out and see if it works for your business model
Productivity and Organisation
1.Monday.com
Monday.com is a mobile and web platform for team and project management. It is an excellent tool for brands, especially for those that work remotely. You can easily customize, plan, upload files, and even have conversations
2.Slack
Say goodbye to an endless email thread, and start communicating with clients and teams directly via Slack. Slack is an instant messaging app where you can easily share files, links, and, in general, keep all conversations in one place
3. Milanote
Milanote is probably one of my favorite tools of all time and highly recommended for designers and artists that want to create visual boards, organize, plan projects and briefs
4. Sked Social
If you are on social media, then I highly recommend you to plan and schedule your content ahead. Sked allows you to upload and schedule images on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter in one go
5. Grammarly
Does your job include writing a lot of content? Do you lack confidence in writing, if so then I highly recommend trying out Grammarly. It will automatically detect spelling mistakes, correct punctuations, help with word choice, etc. and over time, improve your writing skills
6.1Password
Do you find it extremely difficult to remember login details?, if you answered yes, then I highly recommended trying our 1Password. This app lets you save all your passwords in one place, avoiding you a lot of headaches, and most importantly, secure login details from hackers
7.Google Drive
Google Drive is free and allows you to create documents, spreadsheets, store important documents, and photos across mobile and desktop devices
Creativity
8. Adobe Creative Cloud subscription
You will get access to over 20+ desktop and mobile apps from Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, and so much more! Highly recommended if you want to improve your design skills
LEARN ADOBE APPLICATIONS
from Adobe Certified Instructors and industry professionals
There are tons of drag and drop services that allow you to create beautiful websites without any coding, and one of our favorites is Webflow.
You can check out our tutorial on how to bring your Xd documents to a working website
10. Khroma - Colour Inspiration
Pairing colors that work well together can be quite a time-consuming task. We recently discovered Khroma, which automatically generates colors based on your color preferences. Please give it a go, it is incredible
11. Adobe Color
Adobe Color is also a fantastic app for sourcing colors. It recently got a significant upgrade adding a lot of new features and options for creative professionals. Thanks to Adobe Sensei, the artificial intelligence behind all the Creative Cloud apps, you can now search for color themes by using keywords and get results based on Adobe Stock assets and Behance projects
Want to learn how to use it? Watch our tutorial.!
12. Color Hunt
Another color inspiration site Color Hunt founded by the talent artist Gal Shir. There are tons of color schemes to choose from and free to use
13. Procreate (used with Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro)
Procreate is a personal favorite app, used by beginners and professional designers for raster illustrations
14. Vectornator - Vector Drawing
Vectornator app is free for the iPad and Desktop, which allows you to create professional vector illustrations
15. V-fonts
Variable Fonts are available on Adobe software such as Photoshop. Still, you can also find Variable Fonts to download from independent sites such as with v-fonts, which has made working with Typography so much easier.
There are tons of crowdsourcing and design contest sites online that enables designers to find work and connect clients to designers. One of my favorites is 99designs. Want to see how 99designs works? See our full tutorial on getting started
Watch our tutorial as we review some of our favourite design entries on via 99designs
Inspirations
In day to day life, it can be tricky to fit everything in and searching for inspiration can get pushed down the pile a little. BUT you shouldn’t let that happen! Looking at creative work online and wherever you
Some of our team's favourite sites are listed below
Packed full of a wide range of detailed creative projects. Check out our tutorial to see how to use Behance
I hope you found this blog usefull, and hope that it will help to enhance your creativity and productivity.
UP NEXT
We are back with another extensive list of our Graphic Design Trend Predictions for 2020.
