New Hope School, a beacon of hope and education for children with special needs in Pretoria, is set to receive a generous donation of…
8 awesome web design tools to try out in 2016
Being a web designer nowadays means being able to constantly adapt to the latest industry trends. This is because emerging technologies are disrupting almost every industry there is. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, it would be reasonable to keep yourself updated. A revolutionary, hard to use pieces of software have become a rarity. Today, every app is user friendly because we use technology to optimize our performances and increase our productivity. We live in a cyberpunk age, in which the sci-fi tools and gadgets have become a reality. Let us go through some of the web designer tools that might be useful in 2016.
Adobe creative suite offers various useful widgets and mobile apps. Adobe Color CC was formerly known as Kuler. It is a color palette generator that lets you create color schemes with ease.
What is great about this app is that it lets you store your templates which you can use in your designs. It is especially useful to those of us who rely on Adobe CC. You can use Adobe Color CC in the cloud as well, which is also an extremely useful feature. An increasing number of web designers are switching to the cloud. These contemporary entrepreneurs refer to themselves as digital nomads and they are currently at the forefront of innovation.
Put It On Paper from FiftyThree on Vimeo.
This app was created by FiftyThree– an American held company that builds mobile tools for creation. Paper is a beautifully designed drawing app which lets you create sketchbooks and sort them categorically. Other than drawings, the app lets you take notes on the go. Moreover, you can upload photos and draw over them or just highlight something that you find important. This saves up plenty of time when it comes to collaborative projects. Just mark a section that you need altered or replicated and send it over to your colleague for further processing. Voila! Put your ideas on Paper and leave your worries behind.
This is also an American held company that had for its primary purpose to collect various interesting icon designs from all parts of the world. Their goal was to establish international visual communication. It started off as a website, but quickly adapted to become an Adobe widget. Now you can use the Noun Project both as a free and as a paid user. As a free user, you have the right to commercially distribute downloaded icons, however you are required to give credit to the artist. If you want to use royalty-free icons, you can pay a monthly price of just $10.
This company is headquartered in Montreal, Canada. It started off as a website that offers software and app deals at discounts that go up to a staggering 80%. The website offers a large database of software and apps for web designers, businessmen and entrepreneurs of all kinds.
The apps themselves are rated according to the company’s very own rating system. Users can read and write reviews of the apps they download and thus get updated with the latest trends in the industry. Some of the creative tools that can be found on Cloudswave help thousands of architects, sound and web designers and other individuals on a daily basis.
This app comes from a Hague based company called Bohemian Coding and it is sometimes used as a replacement for Photoshop. It is worth mentioning that the app is built exclusively for Mac, but takes advantage of Apple’s frameworks as well. Sketch has a number of useful features, including fast processing of vectors, layers, shapes, filters and effects. The app is extremely widespread and will definitely grow in popularity throughout 2016.
The creator of this app is the “largest independent digital agency in Cyprus”, called SNQ Digital. They created Proto.io back in 2011, but the app has not lost popularity ever since. It is a prototyping tool that lets you create front end prototypes without having to write a single line of code! Proto.io can be loaded directly from your browser and allows for a great drag and drop functionality.
This is the next big thing when it comes to drawing pads. Astropad is an American held company based in Minnetonka, MN. Bassically, the app lets you transform your phone into a nifty little drawing pad. The app is always responsive and fluid. It maximizes battery life by using ARM assembly code. The colors on the app are corrected to match your Mac. Astropad costs, and brace yourselves, only US$20! This is a real game changer when it comes to digital drawing. Astropad is a truly refreshing tool that reminds us of the technological innovation that happens on a daily basis.
Although Slack is a well-known productivity app, it will only increase in popularity in 2016. The app is even used by the team that sent a rover to Mars! The company is based in San Francisco and has become a real disruptor in its field. Stay on the right page with your team members at all times and boost your productivity to the max. Remember, no slacking!
So there you have it. There are millions of web design tools all over the internet. We have tried to pick out some of the most prominent and useful ones for your convenience. If you can think of an app or a piece of software, a website or anything useful that can be included in a web designer’s toolbox in 2016, do not hesitate to let us know.
