7 Tools That Will Help You Do More Productive Design Work

We are huge fans of beautiful, elegant design—but not always of the time it takes to make something beautiful. Luckily, there are a number of tools out there to make life easier for designers and non-designers alike—below, you’ll find seven that we love. If you’re looking to create consistency across your graphics, find the perfect font for your website, or create wireframes in half the time it usually takes, you’ve come to the right place. Check out the full list below for design tools that’ll help you create beautiful things more efficiently.

Illustrio

Infinitely customizable graphics for everyone.

This is such a useful site for anyone looking to create customizable graphics to match a specific logo and color scheme. Creating your own color scheme is as easy as typing in the name of a company (!!!). Illustrio features over 20,000 graphics—from patterns and words to illustrations and icons—allowing you to customize any site, newsletter, or presentation however you’d like. One of our favorite features of this tool is the branding consistency, allowing you to stick to specific styles for design cohesion no matter what you need to create. This is a site every designer and marketer will want to bookmark and come back to over and over again.

Type Anything

Test and create the perfect typography setup for your website.

One of the most important (and challenging) aspects of designing a new product or website is choosing a set of fonts that work well. Type Anything is a tool that helps you put a focus on typography by customizing the most necessary font settings for your next project. Select font families, weights, and letter spacing to create exactly the style you’re looking for. A few keyboard shortcuts that’ll help you: ‘⌘ + K’ will open up a search bar so you can glance through all the font-families and preview before selecting one, and ‘⌘ + J’ will bring up the code for you to copy directly into your project. This is a very valuable tool for designers and non-designers alike.

Pexels 2.0

The best free stock photos in one place.

Finding stock photography for your startup’s website, product, and/or blog can be a huge pain — not to mention a time suck. That’s where Pexels 2.0 comes in. It’s a high-quality, free alternative to paid (read: expensive) stock photo sites like Getty Images and Shutterstock. No more spending hours looking for the perfect image of someone typing on a laptop. And no more paying hundreds of dollars to use a photo, either.

Wirify

Turn any web page into a wireframe in one click.

This bookmarklet let’s you turn any page into a wireframe in literally one click, which will save you literally hours of web design work. One of the coolest things about Wirify is that you can export fully editable wireframes directly into tools like Illustrator, Balsamiq, and OmniGraffle, making it easy for you to edit a wireframe to your specific needs. You won’t regret using this if you’re in the middle of building out a new project and want to study the building blocks of a page with greater ease.

Stencil

The fastest way to create and share visual content.

Stencil makes it so easy to create beautiful visual content that doesn’t look like it was made by a four-year-old (those with minimal design skills, you know what we’re talking about). Choose from more than 680,000 beautiful royalty-free photos and 200,000 icons. There are also a ton of pre-designed templates built for various social sites, like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. This tool will help you create, preview, and load well-designed quote images and more in minutes.

Lorem F*cking Ipsum

Placeholder text for people who have some f*cking passion.

This is quite possibly the best thing to ever happen to web designers. Say goodbye to boring lorem ipsum placeholder text, and replace it with copy that will have you and your team rolling on the floor with laughter. All you have to do is select how many words or paragraphs of placeholder text you need and, ta-da! Out comes the best text ever—you might not actually want to replace it. Here’s a little sample to get you warmed up in the meantime:

f.lux

Adjusts your computer’s display to adapt to the time of day.

No matter how many incredible design tools you have at your fingrtips, at some point it just gets painful staring at a computer screen. Your screen is designed to look like the sun, which is why it’s often not bothersome in the middle of your day. However, what happens when you’re still cranking away on work at 10pm and your eyes are starting to burn?

No fear: f.lux is here to make your screens (and eyes) happier. This tool will make the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day wherever you are. The rest is automatic — easy as that!

Looking for more great design productivity tools? You can find tons more in this collection on Product Hunt: