- Today, I wanna tell you about a bunch of
really useful free tools
that are part of my design process.
(upbeat music)
This video right here is another
in my Tech for Designers series.
I've already made videos about the hardware that I use
and about the design softwares,
subscriptions that I use as part of my process
but today I wanna tell you
about a bunch of really cool little free things
that maybe you might find useful
to add to your process as well.
The first one is a little app called Paparazzi.
This is used for taking full page screenshots of websites.
As part of my process, when I'm working with a developer
on a site being built,
when I wanna give feedback, I like to take a full screenshot
using Paparazzi of the site in its build mode
and then I upload it to InVision
and click in places to leave comments
and feedback for the developer.
It's a really useful way of doing it
and Paparazzi is how I take those screenshots.
All you have to do is put a link in
and it'll take the image for you
and you can change the size of it as well.
So this is how I get images of what the site looks like
on mobile, on tablet and on a desktop.
Next up is a little tool that lives in my top bar.
It's a color picker and it's called Sip.
The purpose of this tool is that you can click
anywhere on your screen and it'll give you a color code
for whatever you clicked on.
So it's really useful if you see a nice color
used on a website and you don't wanna bother
going into the dev tools to figure out what it was.
Sip can help you out with that.
When you click on a color as well,
it automatically saves the Hex code
or whatever you've set as the default
to your clipboard as well
making it really easy to go ahead
and use that color in your own design.
Next is a Chrome extension
that I find myself using when I really like a font
that I've seen used on another website and that is WhatFont.
When you have this extension selected,
you just have to click on a piece of text on a website
and it'll load this little window
telling you all the details
about what font you're looking at,
what size it is, what color it is.
It's really useful.
You could find out all this information of course
by going into the Developer Tools
but it's much easier to just do it this way.
Next up, two tools you'll already know about
if you watched my last video about exporting assets for web
but they deserve a mention in here too.
These are two tools for compressing images.
The first one is an app called Image Optim.
This is really handy because you just have to drag
an image file into it and it'll compress the heck out of it.
It'll then just save over your original file
with one that is a lot smaller but still good quality.
And the next one you could use for this is TinyPNG.
Now, like I said in my last video,
I end up not using this one so much anymore
but this is a really handy website
that you can just drag an image up to it
and it's gonna compress it a lot for you
then you can download it and use that asset in your website.
I prefer Image Optim because it does
the whole saving over the original thing
whereas with this one, you have to download the image
and then find it in your Downloads folder again
but still, it's a really useful tool.
The next one is Toggl and this is an app for time tracking.
I quite like tracking my time because it gives me a view
of how long I'm spending on each project
and time tracking is especially important
for client projects 'cause you wanna make sure
even if you're not building by the hour
that you're aware of how long the project is taking
so that maybe you can learn for next time
if you haven't quite scoped it out right.
There's many time tracking tools out there
but Toggl is my favorite because I like how it's designed
and I like its option to have categories
and add clients, et cetera.
The next one is also related to time.
It's an app called Focus Keeper.
Now, I debated whether or not to include this
because it does actually cost one pound 49
in the UK app store so it's probably 99 cents in the US one
but it's so cheap that it's almost free
so I thought that it could fit into this video.
I really love using this to focus my time hence its name.
I use something called the Pomodoro technique
when I really wanna find some focus on a project.
It's basically a technique of working
where you work solidly for 25 minutes with no interruptions
and then you have a five minute break
to deal with all that checking Twitter
and making a cup of tea
that you wanted to do during those 25 minutes
so it's a really good way of working.
It works out well for me
and Focus Keeper is a really nicely designed app
that helps you keep a timer on this
and if you are opposed to paying for an app
that will do that then you can use the website,
TomatoTimer to do the same thing
but I just prefer the way Focus Keeper
keeps track of how many you've done in a day, et cetera
and I like its notifications.
This last one is gonna be really handy if you're like me
and find yourself constantly running out of
hard drive space.
It's called Omnidisk Sweeper
and it's an app that sweeps your hard drive
and then arranges your files in order of size.
I find it really handy for figuring out
which folders files are in
that are sucking up a lot of gigabytes on my hard drive
so I can go in and delete them
or move them to a backup if necessary.
Those are all the tools that I have to tell you about today
but I hope there's something in there
that you might find useful to add into your design process
and if you've got anything like this
that you think I might like or find useful to know about
then leave that down below in the comments
'cause this can go both ways.
Thank you for watching this video.
Please give it a thumbs up if you enjoyed it.
The best way to support my channel
because I don't run ads on these videos
is to go ahead and check out my online store
and pick yourself up a t-shirt or a notebook or a print.
I design them all myself and in the case of the t-shirts,
I print them myself too so I'm really proud of them
and I think you'll like them.
Thanks again for watching and I will see you
in my next video.
Bye.