Throughout my time as a designer I have been constantly surprised by the fact that there is a better way to do something that I had been doing for years. These things can be small like a keyboard shortcut that might save you a second or two but in the course of a few years save you countless hours and energy. Or it could be a WordPress framework that saves us months!
Recently discussions with the other designers at Pollenizer have all been framework or tool centric, so I thought a blog post could be a good way to start discussion and find out some of your favourite tools shortcuts and share ours.
- A good code editor, my current choice and choice for a while is Coda2. Everyone has their own workflow but for me Coda does the trick, it has lots of options to change the UI to suit. The built in FTP is great for when you are working on a live site that doesn’t use GIT. It does have built in GIT but I still use terminal/tower. The sites management is a god-send, I at times have to work on as many as 10 websites in ONE day, quickly switching between these is a real time saver. It also finally has code folding. Finally it’s nice to be able to share files across the network so your studio mates so they don’t have to get out of their chair.
Having said all that, all my colleagues at Pollenizer use Sublime Text 2 so make sure you check that out. -
Front-end Frameworks. There are many different types and depending on what you’re working on you will need to change them up. Previously Frameworks like Thematic for WordPress and templates like Boilerplate save me many hours and made me a better designer/developer. Currently I regularly use Boostrap by twitter to rapidly produce websites that will work on any device and in any browser. Along with Omnigraffle (wireframes), some free stencils and PSD templates you will be wire framing, designing and then building faster than you ever had before.
Another one I’ve been keen to try another framework that looks very promising is Foundation 3. I’ll let you know how that one goes. -
Designing a website in photoshop can be a pain, especially if you plan on using grids. There are always some PSD templates like the Bootstrap one above that will help but my favourite tool is Guide Guide. I’m a new user so I won’t go into it much except to say it has improved my mockups considerably.
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Ever designed a website or EDM and thought it looked a bit flat? Ah! Maybe it needs some texture. Subtle Patterns is your one stop shop. Not only do they provide tillable downloads of every pattern, they provide the most useful resource of ALL the patterns on the website as photoshop .pat file. Get that jewel here.
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iPhone development trick. This one requires you to download Xcode from apple. You may have used the IOS simulator previously but can’t find it anymore? Go to to the Applications folder with Finder, right-click Xcode and Show Package Contents, then navigate like so:
Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications
In the Applications folder you’ll find the iOS Simulator app.
Make sure you drag it to the dock so you don’t have to do all that again.
Bonus non Web-Design tip:
Double tapping the shift(uppercase) key on an iPad or iPhone puts caps lock on so you don’t need to press it each time!
There are many many more, I’m sure I could almost do one of these a week, but feel free to send your tips to toby@pollenizer.com