Mastering design productivity: essential tools of the trade
As we move along in February and think more and more about how to continue the year being as productive as possible, I’ve started thinking more and more about the tools that I use everyday in my design business that I cannot live without.
I am a firm believer in purchasing programs, memberships and courses that will help me save time (and ultimately money) while improving my craft. However, I also like to keep my programs lean and I personally don’t invest in anything that I won’t use in the next 3-6 months, unless the deal is out of this world and the savings will benefit me in the end.
That said, a lot of the programs I use in my tech stack can be on the expensive side, and for that reason, I have listed them below, but have explained what I primarily use them for and why they are important to me.
My biggest piece of advice to a small business owner who is feeling overwhelmed by technology and the often intimidating amount of choices that are available for almost every type of business task, is to figure out what you spend the most time on, what programs will help you decrease that time significantly and that are within your budget.
Here are my favourite programs for small business owners that are looking to be productive in their daily operations.
Adobe Acrobat Pro - this has to be one of my favourite design programs and is essential for anyone who is working with a lot of PDF documents in their business. You can do a lot of things with the free version of Acrobat, but it does have it’s limitations but if you are willing to invest around $20/month for your business, I promise that you won’t regret it because it will automatically save you time, which could possibly lead to saving you money.
There are a lot of free websites available for creating fillable pdfs, but they seem to all use the cloud system in which you have to upload a pdf, make edits to it, whether that’s deleting text, rearranging pages or adding fillable forms and they may or may not have a limit to the amount of pdfs you can edit or you may have to pay a premium price to increase the amount.
With Acrobat, the pdfs get stored locally on your computer or external hard drive and you can edit, re-edit, add to them, save over them, replace pages as well as dozens other functions that are available with the program. You can even use the program for in your prepress process, but that’s a bit more complicated for advanced users.
Adobe Photoshop. Okay, full disclosure - I am a huge fan of Adobe products - I have been using Adobe for over 25 years (wow that feels like a long time when I say it out loud!). As a professional designer, I’m working with photographs on a daily basis where I need to crop them, change their colour, add in alternative text for accessibility and analyze their size and resolution. Like Acrobat pro, there are many free programs online that are able to perform these functions. However, Photoshop has been around for many decades, is a trustworthy program and comes from a reputable company and has all the functions you most likely need when working with photographs all in one program.
My second biggest tip for small businesses is to take advantage of subscriptions that offer more than one product. Here are my current favourite subscription services.
Social curator - you get so many beautiful, high-quality images along with caption templates that you can use for multiple marketing pieces. The platform is also now using an AI tool to make it even easier for you to write social media posts, website copy, video scripts and so much more. It’s definitely one of my favourite tools to use in marketing.
Envato elements - this is a must-have for anyone who requires creating high-quality digital mock-ups such as perfume packages, mugs, t-shirts, signs and much more. Envato also includes images, icons, illustrations and a series of tech tutorials.
Canva is probably an obvious one but I’ll mention it anyway, as many entreprenuers are using this incredibly powerful and versatile program to create their own marketing materials. Canva has hundreds of free templates to choose from to help you get started with designing your marketing. A few tips when using Canva. It can get really complex and overwhelming to have so many choices available to you, so I would recommend that when you are working with a pre-designed template that is right for your business and to choose templates that have the structure that you are looking for, rather than the brand elements - which you can add in yourself.
Whatever programs you choose to purchase over the next 3-6 months, make sure that you are actually going to use them. It is really easy to be swayed by others and to fall into the trap of purchasing sexy products and offers that just sit on your virtual shelf. They may be great products and will be useful in the future, but unless it’s a great deal that you can’t possibly pass up, I would suggest to wait until you can actually use them in your business.