5 essential design tools for 2019
It’s been more than a month since I made resolutions, and I’m glad to say I’m keeping them! Apart from resolutions, I’ve been keeping a tab on tools for mobile and my trusty laptop, which help me with my design practice.
“Tools come and go, but some live on your desktop forever”
After destroying a classic phrase, like the one above, I thought of listing out my 6(5+1) favourite tools as a UX/UI designer.
Drubbbler (not dribbble)
This is a gem of a web tool, which I stumbled upon this year itself. It basically allows you to schedule shots for Dribbble, and lets you add the tags, title, description and rebounds, all from one webpage. This is really handy for people who want to post a design on another day — rather than setting a reminder, just set up a scheduled post.
Every tool comes with downfalls. Drubbbler only allows you to upload a maximum of 800 X 600 pixel images, unlike the glorios 1,600 X 1,200 pixel images you can upload on the actual dribbble website. Also, there is no support for videos, only JPEG, PNG and GIF’s are welcome.
Start using it here: https://drubbbler.com
Adobe Capture (for mobile)
This is a handy tool for your phone (both iOS and Android), which allows you to capture and detect colors, patterns, shapes, fonts, material and brushes in your actual surroundings. Just point your phone’s camera to any object, poster, artefact or anything that interests you, and let Capture do all the work for you. This app is surprisingly quick and is absolutely free of cost. The best part is, it syncs with your Adobe Creative Cloud account, which means everything stays backed up on the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere.
There is a slight downslide in this app as well. There is a slight learning curve when it comes to making patterns and brushes. So before you go out to discover cool designs, just make sure you try out all the features and options.
Get it from here: https://www.adobe.com/in/products/capture.html
Khroma
Khroma is not a very well known tool, since it’s still in Beta, but it’s a Must Try on my list. I found this tool from a blog post on awwwards.com, and I’ve grown to like it quite a lot ever since. It tries to detect your taste in color and suggests you colors you should use. Apart from suggesting colors and palettes, it also allows you to test colors with text, images and posters. It also has a wide variety of gradients, which are in my opinion much better than the gradient creation tools out there.
My experience with this tool wasn’t exactly very smooth. It asks you to select 50 colors in the very first step, which will allow it to ‘train’ the AI. If you go through this step, you have to wait about 2 minutes to access the next step, which is choosing colors, gradients, images and more. If you’re patient enough, this tool is really cool to use on a regular basis.
Here’s the Link: http://khroma.co
ColorSlurp
This is one of those apps, which has the same features as it’s competition, but is just ‘different’. ColorSlurp, as the name hints, literally ‘slurps’ when picking a color from your screen. It actually plays a slurping sound when you click to pick a color. It’s actually quite powerful, considering it is a free tool. Unfortunately, like Sketch and other design applications, this one is only for Mac users. As you can see in the screenshot above, it boasts being the best color picker in the universe. To be honest, it might just be. You can get the Pro version as well, with some extra features like a dark mode, advanced settings and 20 color formats (I’m actually surprised to find out there are 20!). For you Touchbar users, this app has touchbar support as well.
The only downside I could discover is that it’s slightly buggy. Sometimes when I’m picking a color from a part of my screen, it suddenly crashes and needs to be opened manually again.
Get this tool: http://colorslurp.com
Kami and Kami 2
This one’s actually a game, but is a tool for inspiration. Kami is an Origami inspired puzzle game where you have to fill in a common color on the entire screen, and it animates as if a paper is being folded into many small triangles. You face many different and cool patterns as you proceed in the game. This is one of the games where a little bit of your grey matter would have to be used. There are more games by the same game designer/developer, which are all design masterpieces. Kami 2 is for free, so this is the game I mainly play (yes, I try not to spend money on the app store).
Ads! Ads are the main downfall, and can be a dealbreaker for many. However, I do understand the fact that Ads are important for such free games.
Check it out: https://www.stateofplaygames.com/games
Bonus: Avocode
Avocode is a great tool for converting designs into code for development. You can import adobe xd, sketch and photoshop files. Once you do that, you can export to HTML and CSS straight from avocode or inspect each element as a web component. If you’re designing a mobile app, you can export elements for android and iOS, which should give a smooth start to your application development process. You can either do all this on their website or download the app for Mac or Windows. This service is great for both individuals as well as teams. You can set up teams on a single plan and allow people to collaborate on a project.
This service has a trial for 14 days and after that you can pay based on how big your team/company is. So, if you’re looking for a free tool, this one’s not for you.
Get started with Avocode here: https://avocode.com
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