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Software for Designers

wordcloud of software apps

Here are some of the apps we talked about in class. They are in no particular order, and a few of them may be deprecated (no longer supported). I’ll be adding to and revising these lists after class.
The ones I use the most are the Microsoft Office products (Excel, Word) and Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Fresco).

This post contains affiliate links . I may make a small amount of money if you buy something through a link you click, but it doesn’t cost you anything extra. However, I recommend them because I find them incredibly useful tools, not because I’m an affiliate!

Microsoft Word logo
Microsoft Excel logo

Project Management and Time Tracking

ToDoist
Trello
Asana
Monday
Workflowy
Slack
Toggl – time tracking
Calendly – scheduling
Google Calendar

Spreadsheets

MS Excel
Google Sheets – free
Apple Numbers – for Mac users
Open Office Calc – open source

Image Editing

Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Lightroom
Affinity Photo
Gimp – open source
PicMonkey
Canva
Snapseed

Vector Graphics

Adobe Illustrator
Affinity Designer
Inkscape – open source

Sketching and Illustration

Adobe Fresco
ProCreate – iPad only

Layout

Canva
PicMonkey
Adobe InDesign
Affinity Publisher
Adobe Express

Social Media Graphics

Canva
PicMonkey
Adobe Creative Cloud Express

Communications with Editors/Testers

Slack
YarnPond
Trello
Google Docs (in-app comments)
Word (in-app comments)