Our Favorite Tools for Designers

Having the right tools as a designer can make all the difference in your creative process. But with so many options available in today’s digital age, which tools are the best? 

As brand and website designers, we’ve tried a variety of tools throughout the years. We’ve narrowed down our selection to four favorite tools–the classics. Think of these tools as a capsule wardrobe, the key pieces that layer for an impeccable, professional finish. 

Whether you’re creating digital illustrations, designing website templates, or crafting custom brands, these four tools will help you streamline your creative process and elevate your design. 

Our Favorite Designer Tools

1. Procreate 

Procreate is where our design process begins, where ideas are sketched to life. This digital painting app offers a tactile drawing experience, with over 200 customizable digital brushes. Our design team loves using Procreate for brainstorming logos, drawing icons for custom brands, and creating textured backgrounds for our client designs.  

Procreate is incredibly intuitive and offers a wide range of features, including advanced tools for blending, freehand selection, color filling, and more. 

Related: How to Choose the Perfect Colors for Your Brand 

We haven’t grabbed these brushes for ourselves yet, but our friend Jill swears by these watercolor brushes for Procreate.

2. Adobe Creative Cloud Suite

The Adobe Creative Cloud Suite is our bread and butter for client graphics. This suite covers the gamut of digital design, providing a comprehensive package that includes Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and many other programs. One of our favorite features about Adobe Creative Cloud Suite is its versatility across multiple platforms and devices. This makes team collaboration a breeze! 

Subscribing to the Adobe Suite also gives you access to the full Typekit library of fonts. 

At the time of this writing, Adobe offers a free 7-day trial for all of its apps, including our two favorites, Photoshop and Illustrator.  

Adobe Photoshop 

Adobe Photoshop is one of our favorite tools inside the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, particularly for image-heavy designs. It is a photo and design software that gives you complete control over your imagery. 

We start every design project with a mood board (even when we’re just doing a website!) and Photoshop is our go-to tool. If you want to learn why we do this, read here: Why Mood Boards Matter. 

Photoshop provides an extensive library of resources for creating visual designs, including layers, masks, filters, brushes, color correctors, and more. It is the perfect resource if you work heavily with images in your designs. 

Download: Our Free Brand Questionnaire for Designers

Adobe Illustrator 

We turn to Adobe Illustrator for every brand design. Within the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, Illustrator is the perfect software to create digital illustrations, logos, typography, and more. 

Why? 

Illustrator is a vector-based software, which means you can create scalable vector graphics, resizing your designs without losing quality. 

Similarly to Photoshop, Illustrator has an advanced color system perfect for creating beautiful brand color palettes. It also provides path controls and anchor points for smooth lines. 

Illustrator is essential for heavy type design as well as logo and icon creation. 

Related: The Anatomy of a Brand

3. Sketch 

For our in-house social media graphics and our Brands that Book podcast episodes, Sketch is perfect. Our team also uses Sketch to lay out website designs. 

Created solely for Mac users, Sketch is a streamlined interface for designers. The layout is intuitive and minimalistic, allowing creatives to focus on one design at a time. Just like Illustrator, Sketch provides a vector-based workflow that allows designs to be resized easily. 

Sketch also provides an array of plugins and an amazing community of support. We love how it allows multiple team members to collaborate on designs at the same time. 

4. Canva 

Canva is helpful for our in-house social media reels as well as ad design. We love Canva because the designers on our team can create beautiful, easy-to-use social templates for the non-designers on our team.

With a drag-and-drop interface, Canva does not require extensive design experience. It also comes with a seemingly endless number of ready-made designs. Simply type in the search area the type of graphic you want, swap their text and images for yours, change the colors, and download in whatever size or format you need. 

In Canva, you can also effortlessly copy and resize multiple graphics at once, which is often handy. While Canva is not our main graphic design tool, we keep it close by.

If you’re a Canva user, check out our free graphics —

Conclusion

If you’re just starting out in the world of design, consider trying these four marketing tools. They are our favorite tools, and our design team never fails to create impeccable, professional designs by utilizing them.  

Whether you’re creating digital illustrations, designing website templates, or crafting custom brands, having the right tools is crucial. We hope these four tools help you streamline your creative process and elevate your designs—they certainly have for us! 

Do you have any questions or thoughts about any of the designer tools we listed above? 

Comment below, we’d love to hear your input.