8 must have tools every designer needs

8 great and useful must have tools that every designer should or could use to simplify his or her hard work on their projects.

1. Skitch

The first must have tool is Skitch. Use Skitch to make your screenshots and take it to the next level.
Ruler guides and pixel dimensions are shown when dragging out the area of the screen you want to capture.
This is great when you need images of a specific size.

But that’s not all! It comes with great extras:
– You can easily add text, arrows, shapes, lines,.. and you can pixelate certain things to keep private
– Easy to share the screenshot
– Easy to save the screenshot

2. Jing

With Jing you can do similar things like Skitch (see above) but with Jing you can also record what you are doing. Great tool to make video tutorials.

3. Mockingbird

Mockingbird is a web based tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application.

4. Balsamiq

This tool is similar to Mockingbird (see above) but you can use this tool offline.
But on the down side, this is only a trial version. After 7 days you will loose full functionality and you’ll have to buy a key to save your work.

5. Colorzilla

ColorZilla is a great extension for your favorite browser(Firefox, Chrome).
It has a advanced eyedropper, color picker, color analyzer and other colorful goodies. They also provide an easy tool to make all sorts of gradients online, with the CSS that you can copy.

6. Trello

Trello is a decent to-do list available online for free. It makes it easy to organize your work.
You can also add other users so you can share your to-do list. Great for co-ops.

7. FileZilla

Use this must have tool to upload files to your FTP server. FileZilla is an open source free software that can be used for any FTP server.

8. Browsershots

There is nothing worse than making a website that does not work on every browser. This is an incredible web application for checking the compatibility of your website on different screen sizes, browsers and older browser versions. The only problem is, that it does not support Internet Explorer.