One of the most important parts of marketing your business is design. Your website or whatever you’re promoting or selling should look appealing. Apps or landing pages should look professional or else others may be discouraged to give your business another look or classify your business as something that’s not credible or legit. The appearance of your business can make or break it. That being said, we’ve listed down seven awesome tools and resources for your design needs!

You can find everything from collaborative design tools, prototype making tools, photo editing and UI/UX creation tools that could suit you and your team’s needs to make design less complicated.

Zeplin

One of the major struggles in a team of designers and developers is easy communication. Designers create designs and interfaces with functions already in mind and often times, those functions or styles are lost during the developer's phase and it turns into a huge back and forth thing until everything’s perfect. What if your developers aren’t in-house? It’ll take twice more time to get anything and everything done the way you want it. This is where Zeplin comes in.

Founded by 3 developers and a designer in June 2014 and launched in July 2015, Zeplin created a platform that bridges that huge gap of communication between designers and developers. The platform allows designers to upload everything and provide all necessary instructions, details, properties, and functions of each part of the UI design which the developer uses to create the codes.

Here are some noteable features:

Design Hand-off

  • Designers: Upload our layout and Zeplin maps out your layout providing every single detail of your design elements.
  • Developers: All information you need for each part of the layout is laid out for you, no need to go back and forth with the designer for size details etc. Also, Zeplin tailors information that you need based on the platform that you’re using. If you’re coding a layout for Android Zeplin will provide you with dp/sp values and if you’re going for iOS you’ll get pt values.

Style Guide

  • Designers: Store all your style guides (from color palette to fonts) in the cloud for your entire team!
  • Developers: Zeplin exports code snippets out of designs, you don’t need to keep renaming and changing the code for every update! No time wasted.

Commenting/Adding Notes to Layout:

  • Communicate with each other easily! Marking features or parts of the layout with a comment if you need further discussion regarding the feature or part of the layout. No more long winding emails!

Polarr

If you’re planning to venture into a photography business or your business just requires some quick editing for photos, Polarr is a good thing to have on hand. Though some features are only unlocked once you pay for the pro version of the app, the free version already provides a huge amount of features that can be convenient for quick edits just through your web browser.

This was started in 2015 by two college students who loved to code and loved photography. Providing professional tools for photographers easily and conveniently.

Features (free):

  • Face Editing Tools
  • LIquify and Healing Tools
  • Global Adjustment Tools
  • Auto Enhancement
  • History Management
  • Touch Interface
  • Advanced Cropping
  • In App guides
  • Watermark Tool
  • Customizable Themes
  • Basic Filters
  • Custom Filters

Features (Pro, priced at $19.99)

  • All features included in the free version
  • 100+ premium filters
  • Radial Mask
  • Color Mask
  • Brush Mask
  • Gradient Mask
  • Text Tools
  • Denoise Tools
  • Batch Export Tools
  • Batch Resizing Tools
  • Batch Renaming Tools
  • Use Across Multiple Platforms

Feedbag IO

Are you in need of some feedback and suggestions about your current design? Well, here’s a platform that you can use! It’s called Feedbag. This tool allows you to upload your files (supports JPG, GIF, PDF, PNG, PSD, AI) into a “bag”. This “bag” is like a folder appearing as a slideshow. Once you’ve created your bag, you can get the link and send it out. It’s quick to learn and lightweight, making it convenient and easy to use by anyone.

People who access your link are allowed to look through all your presented files and comment by clicking any part of the image and placing notes. This tool is great when you’re in need of quick feedback, you don’t need to do much, just drag and drop your files onto the home page and you’re done!

They even provide a demo, which you can access here.

Sketch

If you’re looking for the best tools for creating UI, then Sketch is the best tool for you. It’s an amazing app that simplifies editing for UI/UX. This tool focuses mainly on vectors, which makes it the perfect app for creating UI quickly and conveniently. If you’re about to make your own app or an interface for an app, this tool is definitely what you’re looking for.

Features:

  • Complete Toolkit
  • Non-destructive editing
  • Pixel Precision
  • Vector Editing
  • Export Presets
  • Code Export
  • Grid and Guides
  • iOS Mirroring
  • Sync assets, symbols into your library for your entire team.

UICloud

This free tool is pretty amazing. It’s a library of everything and anything you need for creating your UI. You don’t even need to register. Simply browse through the collection and you’ll find all kinds of elements for your interface design, you can find progress bars to download buttons and music players. This collection strives through its dedicated community that’s willing to share their UI elements/UI Kits. Some are free and some are paid, everything is uploaded with their corresponding licenses from the creators.

Another great thing that UICloud is that the site offers a button creator. This tool provides presets but you can also customize it accordingly to what design would fit your website. They even provide the CSS and HTML codes for the button which is convenient.

InVision

The best way to present or pitch your design to a group of people that may just fund your business would be through a working prototype. Instead of just sending screen captures and having tons of them just to show what one feature of your design does upon interaction, you can have prototypes that actually functions. InVision makes this possible in the most convenient way. All you have to do is upload your design and InVision provides all the features that you can use to make it work. It's not even limited to just websites, you can even do mobile prototyping, complete with gestures! How’s that for convenient?

InVision cuts process and time down, easily giving a visual and working view of an idea or design. It’s convenient and extremely helpful to solidify and strengthen your idea. You can even add comments and feedback on the mockup itself for further editing and discussion. Definitely a great tool you should have and it’s free...forever!

Crayon Inspire

Inspiration is a great way to kickstart that creative juices flowing and Crayon Inspire provides just that for you. Crayon Inspire has a huge collection of websites and layouts. What’s pretty amazing with this tool is that you can see the history of that page’s design. Take, for example, Pinterest’s about page, you can find all of the changes that Pinterest has taken and what direction they chose to take as time went by. It’s pretty interesting and there’s a lot you can learn by backtracking to how a design started out because design trends change and maybe you’ll even find out what brought about this decision of change, what design trends changed over the span of time.