Eight Essential Design Management Tools

Cherrypicked

Essential design tools to improve your workflow and optimize your time

A new year just started and digital design has never been so rich with tools to help us do what we do best, while improving our productivity by giving us focus, control and a fair amount of automation. As freelancers, we both want to stay on top of the game by honing our design skills, but also increase productivity when it comes to other tasks, not necessarily design-related, but equally important to do a great job as freelance professionals.

Here I collected the tools that I've taken with me with the new year and I hope that more people find this list useful.

1. UX/UI Design

The options are growing rapidly here. From a few years ago, when Photoshop was the go-to tool, to now, lots has happened. First came Sketch and disrupted the whole thing by making a tool especially targeting UI design. Then many others joined the stream. A few of them have gained popularity among designers to become more of a standard — these are the ones.

Sketch, whic h you can get for 99$/year for a new license or 69$/year for the renewal of an existing one, which includes 1 year of updates and Sketch Cloud.

Figma has gained a lot of ground recently, being very good at collaboration, but also having a more advanced prototype features than others. Sharing with other stakeholders is also very easy. The pricing model includes a free version with up to 3 projects and 2 collaborators, while the paid subscription — 144$/year or 15$/month — allows unlimited projects and collaborators, as well as other useful features.

Adobe XD is a close contender too, albeit at the moment still not as complete as the tools above. On the other hand, in the free version, it's possible to have unlimited files, while the sharing functionality is limited. The full version for XD is 9.99$/month unless you pay for the whole Adobe Creative Cloud (See next section).

2. All-round design

As a designer you might find yourself doing a wide spectrum of things, ranging from illustration, to photo editing, animation, etc. For that reason, the Adobe Creative Cloud package offers everything to cover all of those use cases and more. At first look, you might think it's pricey, but it's a great suite of products and easily used several times a month if you do more than strictly UI. The monthly price is 52.99$.

3. Prototyping

Prototyping is key to many stages in the design process: from a simple sanity test on your own to user testing, presentations, stakeholders management, everything is much easier to understand when you can click around and see the thing happening right on the device.

Prototyping can be a simple click-through flow or a more realistic one using animations and transitions. Using real data with API and the like can be a much-needed way to test a product in an as-realistic-way-as-it-gets, without having to implement the design just yet.

For simple click-through and transitions between screens, InVision (15$/month for 3 prototypes or 25$/month for unlimited prototypes) and Marvel (144$/year or 16$/month) are simple but effective tools. If you're considering using Figma for the design, it comes with a pretty good prototyping functionality, which adds to its price competitiveness.

If you want more advanced animation features, then Principle is the go-to tool. Unfortunately only available for macOS, otherwise very good handover from Sketch and Figma — given that you keep your layers tidy. It costs 129$ for a year of updates. While sharing with stakeholders can be a pain (also Apple users only), the experience of having a high-fidelity prototype in your hands with this quality could be worth the downsides.

Are you comfortable with React and APIs and looking to test with real data? Look no further, Framer is the tool for you. It also has design capabilities, so it could be the only tool for both purposes, although not as advanced as Sketch or Figma. It costs 144$/year or 15$/month.

4. Handover

If you are leaning towards Figma, then you get great handover capabilities with it. Even Marvel and InVision have this functionality. If you choose Sketch or XD as your design tool, then you should look into Zeplin. The price ranges from 204$ to 312$/year. Quite pricey indeed.

5. Presentations

As a designer, chances are that you also need to make more structured presentations for your designs from time to time.
Keynote is a great tool and it's free, although only available on macOS.

Google Slides is also a very good tool, and like all Gmail account tools, it's free and supports live collaboration. If you're looking for more advanced features or would rather have your domain as opposed to gmail.com, G Suite has a basic membership plan for 6$/month.

6. Cloud storage

Storing files only on a hard drive is a hazard. We all know someone whose laptop has received an abundant cup of coffee on the keyboard and inevitably risked losing everything with every drop leaking into its black magic.

To avoid that, and be able to drink your coffee without risking any loss, cloud storage is a handy solution. Not only it's a backup for yourself, it's also a swift way to share files with your team and stakeholders. Also, version control is a godsent feature that can save your day if you accidentally remove things from a file.

Top services are Google Drive, Dropbox, Apple iCloud. They all come with a limited-storage, free version; if you instead need more than a few GB (let's face it, who doesn't) Google Drive has a 2TB plan for 99$/year, Dropbox and Apple iCloud cost instead 120$/year for the same space.

Dropbox' different touchpoints: full app, minimized view, local folder

7. Note-taking

Note-taking could be an article of its own. That's because the use cases are many and the tools have multiplied over the years.

Granted, nothing stops you from just writing on a simple text editor and saving it in your hard drive. However, new software has increased the workflow incredibly that it is worth taking a look at the possibilities.

Google Docs. Once again a good option for its collaboration and sharing features, but it's not more specific to note-taking than any text editor out there. It's browser-based only, which might be a con for some people

One of the most popular note-taking tools is Evernote. I've used it for many years and never felt like I needed the premium version — however, if you treat note-taking more like a hub, where you upload media and share with others, the premium plan is 7.99$/month.

Another tool that has gained a huge amount of traction lately is Notion. Notion is easy to use and beautiful, but it also allows much more than just writing text: using the principle of blocks, you can quickly make a to-do list, a kanban board, table, calendar — all in one document. Its versatility makes it a great tool for oneself as well as teams, so you can jump from your meeting notes to the team's task board. The free version comes with limited storage (1000 blocks), while the cheapest paid plan is 4$/month for a single user.

Dropbox paper is another complementing tool of a bigger service, part of the storage subscription offering. If you know you will get a Dropbox plan, it's a nice editor to try. It's especially thought for collaboration, but a bit thin on the editor part.

If you just want a simple text editor that lets you focus on your writing and nothing else, you should look into iA Writer. It's a markdown editor and it's so clean that you might even forget you are using a software. It costs a one-time fee of 29.99$.

8. Task management

Keeping track of what you should do in a project can get messy sometimes. Things come in from the side, other things get bumped in priority, others have dependencies on some to be done before. You need to be able to see your progress as well as how much and what is left to do.

Trello is a great tool for that. Sure, many management tools can do advanced things, such as Notion, Asana, Monday. But the strength of Trello is that it does just that… task management. There is a free version with limited team and customer support features; otherwise, the cheapest paid plan is 120$/year or 12.50$/month.

9. Videoconferencing

Google Meet is another tool part of the Google offering. It's fully integrated with email and calendar, making it swift to use. It allows calls with multiple people at the same time and the video/sound quality is very good. For those calling in, there is no need for a Google account.

10. Time reporting

Keeping track of the time spent in a project is fundamental to have a transparent relationship with your clients, but also for you to know how much time you are spending versus the budget you have been given.

Tools like toggl or everhour help you do just that, both with a free plan and the cheapest paid plan for respectively 86$ and 96$ per year.

11. Password management

Being your own business, you need to store lots of important information. Passwords need to be safe and changed regularly. Setting apart a budget for a password management tool is a much-needed safety measure and it will easily repay itself.

1Password is not just a password management tool. It even lets you store credit card information, IDs, notes and files. It's structured in vaults, and they can be individual as well as shared between more people. A yearly subscription for 1Password is about 36$.

Dashlane offers a free version, although only limited to 50 passwords. If you need more than that (most likely), the cheapest paid plan is 3.33$/month, roughly 40$/year.

Finally, Lastpass is another password management tool that has a free version that should be fine for most users. The premium plan, with priority support, 1GB safe storage, and emergency access, is 36$/year.

12. Numi

Numi is one of the most important tools I have on my work laptop. It's nothing design related, yet it's incredibly useful in all sorts of situations. It's a calculator on steroids: it does the usual calculations, as well as currency conversion, dates, unit measures and much much more. I use it for forecasting, VAT calculation, DP to PX conversion. The main difference with a normal calculator is that it looks and behaves like a text editor and whenever I use it I feel like I have a developer's superpowers. It costs a 1-time-fee of $19.99 and is macOS only.

These are the tools I've taken with me as a freelance designer in 2020, based on my experience and where digital design, freelance practice, and teamwork is pointing towards. Eager to hear of any tools you find interesting and if there are any that should make it into this list.