These are some top 5 picks that could be your go-to mates and would make your day-to-day design life much more fun, hassle-free, and rewarding at the same place.
1. Pricing your project: Cash your Flow
It's not only about the money you should charge, but more about how efficiently you can minimize your load of hassles about quoting, scoping, and pitching the right cost to your potential clients. With more hours and tiresome efforts, if you are not able to justify the reward you are getting, then you must need to look out for some professional tools that can take care of that, and one of them is Cash your flow quite popular among designers.
Cash your Flowis a free interactive tool that is used byWebflow developers to calculate and price their services in terms of budget and deadline. It is based on the initial finished design and draws on your experience, interest, and financial requirements according to the project’s complexity.
2. Digital Marketing materials: Template.net
Let's say, you have completed your creative work and need to pitch or market to potential clients, you can present a compelling and professional design/project by using a premade template. It becomes more useful when your work needs to meet the strict deadlines
Using Template.net you can find templates for your needs whether it's your resume or a business flyer. These template elements are fully customizable, so you can make changes like adding colors and or your logo without any brush. You might find some free templates for business cards, posters, flyers, videos, animations, social media posts, covers, sales brochures, ad banners, and newsletters.
3. Managing your work remotely: Workflow
Working remotely on your professional tasks, and projects that might need to meet tight deadlines, you would need to be more organized, and collaborative with your personal space or meet your clients at stipulated time. Such things sometimes become hindrances to your freelancing efforts and cause unwanted delays or bad reflection on your work front, with the help of tools available this hassle can be minimized and peace of work can be brought in.
Workfrom provides virtual cafés and a free community database. With the help of virtual cafes, you can create, manage, design, and personalize meeting spaces. You can customize your virtual cafes according to your way, which gives a stimulating experience and you don't feel like hitting on a desk due to just some awful arduous work. These cafés are easy to set up and as well as for others to join, you can be working at home or in an office, you can create a soothing space where that fits right for your communication.
4. Sharing your creations: Dribble and Behance
What if you are able to sell your work, check out your peers' work, and get some ideas to explore or modify your creations? Yes, there are tools that help designers to promote and post their work in open spaces. Dribbble and Behance help designers to share their creations easily and are a great source to know the trend, and designer's style, and pave a way to refine your work if your eyes are stuck on something inspirational.
5. A suite software of designs: Adobe Creative Cloud
A go-to place for performing various design tasks, Adobe’s Creative Suite, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, After Effects and more provides a wide range of design streams. Adobe did a change in their business and from charging for expensive 'boxed' software to a subscription plan- CS6 versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc are still available if you are thinking of getting one. Adobe added many new features and updated its web tools for IOS 7, new versions will be released through Cloud.
