7 Online Design Tools Really Useful for Designers

What are the essential online tools for designers?

This question is harder to answer than you might think. There are simply so many options out there! Who has the time to try them all out and decide for themselves? Online platforms offer simple functionality, yet oftentimes they consist of poorly customizable templates and repetitive styles.

In this post, we will see 7 of these tools which provide a wide variety of design resources to make it easier for you to focus on you work.

1 – SocialSizes: A reference guide for social media images
If your work consists on creating images for social media, targeted ads, and designing social media pages. I suggest using SocialSizes, a amazing tool that allows checking up-to-date sizes for all social media.

2 – Flaticon: A marketplace of SVG files
It’s one of my favorite sources of vector icons and high-quality SVG files. It’s a great library to gather inspiration from vector design for free, and occasionally, purchase icons or icon collections.

3 – Gingersauce: For creating brand books
A big part of a designers’ work has to do with presentation. Since we get paid to make things look right and good, the same approach should apply to our work. Gingersauce is a brand book builder that allows you to present your logos and fonts in a beautiful and automatically generated brand book.

4 – Infogram: For fast infographic design
Creating infographics manually is really hard and stressful. The work is often not as much about creativity and more about organizing information. This is why infographics are the type of work that you should always automate.

5 – Unsplash: For high quality stock photos
There are many stock photo sites (like Pixabay, Freepik, Pexels or Rawpixel) out there and none of them is perfect. However, Unsplash managed to come pretty close. Their selection of photography is creative, high quality, and doesn’t look overly generic.

6 – Giphy: For creating GIFs
Using GIFs on your projects is a nice way to attract more attention to it. However, finding an idea for a funny and unsaw GIF can be a struggle. Giphy can be used as a library of potentially meme-worthy and relatable content. It’s an good way to understand what’s trending and incorporate the visual cues in your design.

7 – Trello: For team management & communication
For the majority of my own projects I like to use Trello. Trello is a easy, free and flexible way to manage your projects and organize anything and is perfect for designers, letting you store files, get feedback, and share PDFs. In my opinion, Trello(https://trello.com/home) feels organized and more like a personal workplace.