Great design is a critical aspect of any internet or social media presence. Like the clothes that you wear to an interview or a business meeting, a clean, sharp looking website or social network profile is the first step toward being taken seriously online. Whether or not you are a professional designer, there are plenty of tools out there that you can use to improve your web presence. This list is composed of Design Tools many of which are free, and essential to your success on the web.
1. Core Application Alternatives
It is a common misconception that the software required to create and edit high quality graphics is expensive. While that misconception is true to some extent (Adobe, Autodesk, etc), there are affordable alternatives which will greatly improve your design tool kit.
Gimp is a powerful free alternative to Photoshop, and Inkscape has a similar mission in the realm of scalable vector graphic (SVG) creation. Unlike bitmapped images (JPEGs, PNGs, which are the final products viewed on a website), vector graphics are mathematical representations of images, and can be scaled up indefinitely to meet any size requirement. This means that one file can be used in any medium (web, print, etc.) at any size. They are indispensable to the illustrating designer.
2. Design Communities
If you are in a creative industry, there is no better way to improve your design skills than by getting social. Social Media networks that are targeted toward artists are beneficial for feedback, constructive criticism and inspiration. A good way to use the internet for inspiration and constructive criticism is by following designers and design blogs on the major social networks and online design communities.
Society6 is an online community that allows artists to showcase their work, sell prints and find others to collaborate with. Behance, This is Central Station, Creattica and Design Taxi are some other great creative communities that I have used that help designers connect and promote their work.
Remember like any social network, the value is in sharing so to get the full experience you should post your own designs. Don’t use these websites just for inspiration, contribute to the experience.
3. Design Element Resources
If you’re not a professional illustrator or digital artist, but you need high quality graphics for blogs, social media profiles, and websites, you need a design resource to draw from.
Dezignus is a great resource for free vector graphics and raster textures, and they have a wide selection of downloads that will improve your designer tool box. Colourlovers.com is an awesome resource for any designer looking for color scheme inspiration.
If you need to expand your font collection Dafont.com has a huge selection of free fonts that are easily accessible and downloadable for pc or mac.
deviantART is also a great resource for sharing and getting design inspiration and tools (Photoshop brushes, textures, icons, and more).
Linking out to social networks is a core element of social web design. Having a Twitteror Facebook icon front and center gives visitors a recognizable channel through which they can connect.
Wonderfully creative social media icon sets are everywhere on the web, and many of them are free for commercial use. But finding the one that perfectly compliments your design (or perhaps inspires a theme in its own right) can be a tiresome process of searching and browsing resource blogs. IconFinder makes the process a bit easier. It’s a search engine for icons submitted by users, with detailed information on their graphic formats and licenses — nearly all of which are free and available for commercial use. The interface provides a convenient way to download icons right from the search results.
If you’re not hunting for something specific, the site also offers a browsable catalog of icon sets.
Building a socially-minded website that is both easy to navigate and visually appealing requires a lot of planning.
“Wireframing” is a very important step in web design. For larger projects and applications Mockflow is a great wireframing tool. MockFlow is a versatile tool that enables you to quickly render functional website prototypes without a big time investment. There are also real-time collaboration and note taking features built into the platform.
A similar tool that is highly recommended for wireframing is Mockingbird.
If you find yourself collaborating on a design project, whether with a colleague or client, the feedback process can get cumbersome via e-mail. It helps to be able to take visual notes on a visual product.
“I use Notable for feedback on projects,” says Smith. “Notable is superb and is ultimately built to allow quick and easy collaboration. It’s helped me streamline my feedback process and keeps all parts of a project organized using sets and workspaces.” Notable works on the web, so you can capture and notate web pages from any computer, as well as your iPhone. Image captures and their respective notes stay organized on your notable account dashboard, and can easily be shared out to your collaborators or team.
Believe it or not, e-mail marketing is still very much a part of successful social media campaigns. Whether you’re looking to up the design ante for your business’s newsletter, or reach out creatively in search of new freelance projects, a design-focused e-mail marketing tool is worth investigating. Campaign Monitor is an intuitive e-mail marketing application created for designers. It has excellent tools for designing professional HTML e-mails, creating and managing e-mail campaigns, useful e-mail analytics, and more. In addition, Campaign Monitor can also be a viable source of income in itself. For designers looking to expand their service offerings, you can re-brand, customize, and resell Campaign Monitor to your clients.
As part of a small team or as a lone freelancer, a designer must wear many hats. Because of the competitive market right now the importance of salesmanship is greater than ever. Designers can have great success by using online proposals to win over a project bid.
Proposable is an online tool that allows you to build highly customized, branded presentations. A Proposable account incorporates an asset library (which can include rich media like video), a variety of templates, and a comment management system for real-time feedback.
Proposable helps you generate professional-level proposals fast and easily. It also has reporting features which allow you to analyze the performance of your proposals. It was created for salespeople, but as a designer, being a salesperson is a huge part of the gig, whether you’re freelancing or pitching a design idea to your managers.
Staying on the business side for a moment, getting paid can often be a struggle for freelancers. For the social web-minded designer, the idea of a cloud-based invoice management system is likely appealing. Freshbooks is an all-in-one web app for invoicing, tracking expenses, time-tracking, and more.
It can be used to keep track of expenses, manage payments, and to generate professional invoices quickly and effortlessly. There are many billing tools out there, but this one stands out because it caters to freelancers, is aimed towards creatives (designers, developers, writers, artists). The fact that it’s all on the web allows you to manage your books from any location.
Creatively, the sky’s the limit when it comes to web design. But the interfaces of the social web generally follow certain patterns that users are accustomed to. If you’re building blog templates or other interactive websites, the 960 Grid System is a good way to map out your page elements so they can achieve alignment harmony.
Many of the designers we spoke to stressed the importance of good old fashioned pen-and-paper sketching in their creative process.
960 Grid provides examples of how the system works with a number of sites, and also offers a wealth of other code-related resources for web designers.
We want to know what design tools you use. Please comment below with some of the Design Tools that you find useful. Whether online application or software, fee or expensive we want to know what you use in your work flow.
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