Here’s a snappy list of super helpful tools I rely on that can help your design process no end, whether you’re designing a logo, a website, a poster or the curtains. Every time I start a project you can guarantee I’ll either use one of these resources or use what I’ve learnt from them.

In alphabetical order:

1. Adobe Color CC

Previously known as ‘Adobe Kuler’ (kuler than all the rest), this tool is so simple and so useful. It helps you design a colour palette that works.

Start by either picking a base colour or import an image and Color will give you a fully tweakable colour palette according to a variety of tried and tested colour harmony schemes.

If you have an Adobe account (free to set up) you can save your palettes for use in projects. These will then be available to use within Adobe CC apps.

2. Adobe XD

Although this is actually quite a simple app, this free app from Adobe has already become a very popular tool for designing web and app interfaces.

You can’t beat a simple pen/pencil and paper combo for starting the design process, but as your ideas start to develop this is a great place to start fleshing out ideas. XD allows you to create multiple artboards and link items together to create clickable visual mockups of your ideas, taking interface design a major step further than Photoshop.

It’s also quite easy to learn.

3. The Futur YouTube Channel

This channel provides priceless and enlightening short video lessons for creative entrepreneurs. There are thousands of channels offering something like that, but in my opinion where this channel really cuts a unique groove is in its real case-study discussions. Sometimes they get deep.

They don’t have 432k subscribers for no reason.

Some popular videos on their channel:

4. Google Fonts

Not only does this site provide 915 free fonts to use online, the tools to search and pair them up are very easy to use. Some of the fonts available have become classics. The sentences used to demo the fonts also sound beautifully poetic.

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Author: Aidan Ashby

Aidan is a web and branding designer living in Bristol, UK. He’s a cautious optimist and is loathe to discuss himself in the third person. He loves pancakes and has a perpetual desire to just be sat in the woods with his feet up in front of a bonfire.

Connect with Aidan on LinkedIn.

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