We live in interesting times. Although the web itself is becoming more complex, there are also an increasing range of clever tools to make our job as web designers more efficient, productive, and creative. We try to spend at least an hour each per week, researching the latest developments and ensuring that our knowledge remains innovative. Here are some of our current favourite tools and what they do:
Frontify Style Guide Tool
This nifty bit of kit offers an awesome way to an develop running and style guides for projects. Simply sign up for free and then manually input what style guide info you have such as colour palette, copy, logos and so forth. This tool will allow you to create a full style guide that you could submit to a client within seconds. We like this tool a lot and well it doesn’t offer the customisation of the human brain, it’s good in a push.
Style tiles
The first deliverables in any potential web design project is to be some kind of mock-up as a catalyst for discussion. The brilliant Style Tiles process is something we use to redefine the way elements interact with one another are supposed to defining a comprehensive layout. We generally use this tool after receiving client questionnaires back in order to sketch out certain fundamental design principles that will follow through the rest of the project. We also find this a useful tool for kicking off the UX part of any process as it often triggers useful questions.
Marvel APP and Invision
These days, prototypes are something we use in all but the smallest projects. This web-based prototyping app Marvel is just plain awesome, allowing for the linking of uploaded screams to create simple clickable prototypes which you can presented client meetings.
To our minds, Invision is a slightly better version of the same thing, offering their nifty screenshot tool, live collaboration from within photo shop and integration with sketch. We use the collaboration tools on Invision for user testing. This is really one of the best evolutions in web design over the last few years according to our thoughts.