Great art and design is like a fine wine – it takes time to produce and the longer you have the better it will taste in the end…but when you have a client who says they need a new website yesterday, the luxury of time goes out of the window.
At that point you only have three things that can help you turnaround a bold, intense and creative masterpiece faster than The Flash!
- Your design expertise
- Your team
- Design tools that can help you get the job done faster
Design tools help you do three things:
- Supply resources which you may not have readily available
- Make more sense of your strategy and work
- Make production quicker
Ultimately it allows me to turn really good work around speedily, and to do it I use these tools to name a few. If you’re a designer (or even if you’re not), give them a whirl.
1. The Noun Project
Icons are mini-masterpieces of design – conveying a single message in one simple, symbolic form, but don’t let their size fool you. It could take hours or even days to design an original icon from scratch, so, when I need an icon quickly, I use The Noun project.
Think of it as like a stock photo site but for icons instead. Sure you can download icons for free anywhere these days but they come with caveats and limited choices. That’s why I love the The Noun Project. Once you signup, their extensive range of icons are open to use freely.
It’s not free, but it is a professional resource that will save you tons of time on a design project.
2. Coolers
Finding complimentary colours, harmonising them and creating working palettes is a bloody nightmare!…colour theory is a very complex thing, and without it you’d be blind! But with the likes of Cooler, you can create a great colour palette with a push of your spacebar – and that’s why I use it.
I also use extensive colour tools like Adobe Color to create colour schemes but one thing that Cooler does really well is generate colour palettes incredibly quick and easily.
3. Adobe Express
I’ve never used the likes of Canva, primarily because I don’t have to. All of my design work is done on Adobe CC, but I can certainly see the benefits and power of something like Canva, and likewise so does Adobe, hence why they created Adobe Express.
Now, don’t get me wrong – Adobe Express is not my daily driver, but on occasion it can be a lifesaver, especially if you need to whip up something really quickly. If a client needs a social media video, I’ll jump onto Photoshop, Premier Pro or maybe even Rush, but they are the intense pro tools that we use.
Enter Adobe Express, a very quick and easy way to produce almost any visual digital content. With templates and stock galore, you can easily pull something together very quickly.
Bonus Hint – The integrated AI image generator is also really good. I rarely generate entire images but when I do, I‘ve found that Adobe Express does a better job of it than Photoshop or Illustrator.
4. Fontbase
In the graphic or digital design world, being a typographer is similar to being a classically trained French chef. It’s as traditional and prestigious as you can get, leaving you with an incredibly high skillset. Unfortunately my typography skills would qualify me to work in McDonalds rather than a restaurant in Paris. Nonetheless I still use fonts on a daily basis, and with a collection of 10,000+ at my disposal. Trying to view them, organise them and test them for a project takes time. The solution is Fontbase.
Available for Free and a paid version, it allows you to install, sort, view, and categorise your fonts easily – a real lifesave that saves a tone of time.
5. Adobes generative AI Cropping tool (or should I say generative background tool?)
Need a new social media post? A new website? Or maybe a flyer? If so you’ll need some photos too. As a result, we spend a lot of our time looking at photos trying to find the right one for the job.
There’s the content of the photo to look at, the context, the suitability and tone, and then there’s the technical aspect, like the format and perspective which is the biggest issue – it decides whether the photo can ultimately be used or not.
We may find the perfect picture in tone but wrong format, so what can we do? – We’d do some nifty work to change the format, turning a portrait photo into a landscape one by extending background and fills. The more complex the background, the harder it is to complete this task but luckily enough we now have something to speed up that workflow…Adobe Generative AI Cropping tool.
The Ai cropping tool can extend and fill the most complex background with a click of a button. It’s a total timesaver doing hours of work in tens of seconds instead.
It’s literally completely changed my workflow and saved me dozens of hours.
Conclusion
I hope this exploration of five fantastic design tools inspires you to elevate your creative projects, even under tight timelines. Just like a well-aged wine, great design is all about quality, but with the right tools at your disposal, you can achieve that quality in record time.
From The Noun Project’s vast collection of icons to other innovative resources that streamline your workflow, these tools are designed to enhance your design prowess and accelerate your production process. Whether you’re a seasoned designer or a novice exploring the world of visual creativity, I encourage you to experiment with these tools and discover how they can transform your approach to design.
Embrace the opportunity to create stunning masterpieces without the pressure of ticking clocks. Cheers to your next creative endeavor—may it be bold, beautiful, and delivered faster than ever before! Don’t forget to share your experiences and any new discoveries in design tools that make your life easier. Happy designing!
