Five Digital Tools That Every Graphic Designer Should Have
Starting a career as a graphic designer? Well, you’re going to need the right tools and these 5 tools are a must have for your graphic design career.
A career in graphic design offers a new and exciting challenge each day. You get to let your creativity flow and provide a service that every business owner needs. Graphic design is almost entirely digitally based, and with technology advancing, there are many ways that digital tools can benefit you. Having the right tools will allow you to be more productive, organized, and streamline your work. They will also open you up to more advanced ways to express your creativity and deliver amazing results to your clients.
Whether you’re just starting, or you’re an established graphic designer, these are the digital tools that you should definitely have.
1. Brandfolder Digital Asset Management
Digital asset management software will be your best friend as a graphic designer. With a bank of clients and countless projects to manage, organization is incredibly important. Building a strong asset portfolio will allow you to present yourself professionally to potential clients.
So, what is DAM?
Brandfolder is a digital asset management software that ensures you make the most of your assets. It will save you time digging through folders, hard drives, emails, and cloud banks trying to find what you’re looking for.
You can keep all your projects and assets in one place and presented professionally. You’ll avoid recreating assets and can maintain brand consistency across your client’s projects. You can quickly share all files with your clients and even see how they are performing and where they are being used. It’s an essential software to add to your digital toolkit.
2. Proofhub
As a graphic designer, there is often a lot of back and forth with clients to get the project just right. It can be tedious and time-consuming to send and wait for emails. Feedback is essential to producing a quality product that your client is happy with, and Proofhub gives you a place to do that.
It’s a software that allows you to manage all your current projects, including client feedback. Your clients can log in and request changes directly to the project. The software provides access to all those involved, and you can make instant changes to your files. You can also add comments to each project to stay up to date with your client. It will keep you organized with your daily tasks and allow you to see exactly what needs to be done each day, streamlining your processes.
3. Adobe Illustrator
Of course, Illustrator had to make it onto this list. Adobe Illustrator is the number one software that a graphic designer will use to create their work. While the first two items on the list will help manage projects effectively, Adobe Illustrator is necessary to actually complete them.
The software allows you to create a variety of digital projects. It’s the best of the bunch for creating high-quality vector images, which can be blown up to any size without a reduction in quality. You can use this software to design logos, infographics, diagrams, graphs, illustrations, and more. Basically, anything graphics-related that you need to design for a client, you can do in Illustrator.
4. Adobe InDesign
InDesign is another tool that is extremely useful for graphic designers. Where Illustrator excels in creating original vector graphics and designs, InDesign is better for text-heavy, multi-page media products. It’s functional for designing brochures, magazines, invitations, business cards, posters, books catalogs, manuals, and more. Anything that requires more than one page, and doesn’t require original designs, is doable in Adobe InDesign. It’s much more user-friendly for manipulating text, so if your project contains more text than graphics, InDesign is the better option. The Adobe platforms excel in different ways for designers, and it’s essential to have both so you can offer a full range of services.
5. Paletton
Paletton is a fun graphic design tool that will help you create brand kits and build a brand identity for your clients. A good color scheme will help your clients define themselves in their specific industry and make them stand out among the rest. Paletton will create a compelling color scheme for you, which you can then implement in your designs. You can choose the colors you like, and it will generate the rest around that. There are also pre-set combinations that you can choose to use, including triad and adjacent colors. Or you can opt to go freestyle and see what fun scheme it generates for you.
Just as a plumber needs their tools to do their job, a graphic designer needs a digital toolkit to help them optimize their business. These five tools will help you live up to your potential as a designer by streamlining your processes, keeping you organized, and giving you access to top-of-the-line creation software.
