Throughout my career as a Graphic Design and a Front-End Developer I often get asked about the tools and applications that I use to create the things that I do. I thought now might be a good time to discuss that and what I like about them.
Now this list is ever changing because tools are evolving and new ones are being created. So here are the list of tools and applications that I use today in the first half of 2016
Figma
Figma is where I do all of my wireframe and hi-fi mockups for my web design. It is perfectly suited for this purpose and offers a lot of functionality and tools that I need to get the job done.
Adobe Photoshop
https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html
This one is a clear choice. The flagship product from Adobe to edit and create raster (pixel) based images. I use this application mainly to edit photos for use in other applications.
Adobe Illustrator
https://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator.html
Illustrator is a wonderful vector (math) based app that I use to create logos, business cards, and other one off projects that are single pages.
Adobe InDesign
https://www.adobe.com/products/indesign.html
InDesign is a page layout app that is used for multi-page documents and general layout that I don't want to do in Illustrator.
Sublime Text 3
This is where all the magic happens. Sublime is an amazing text editor where I do all of my coding. It is available for all platforms (OSX, Windows, Linux) and offers some pretty cool features such as multiple selections, plugins, and much more. If you need a great text editor, you can not go wrong with Sublime
Grunt
Grunt is a NodeJS based Javascript task runner. What does that mean? Well, it is used for automation. I use it from linting JS, SASS complies, SVG and image minification, and automatic browser refreshing. But it can do so much more. Grunt speeds up my workflow a great deal
iTerm
iTerm is pretty straight forward. It is a replacement for OSX's Terminal app. It is a command line app plain and simple.
Git
Version control for code is super important. Pretty much every developer is working with it today. It allows multiple developers to work on the same codebase without stepping on each others toes.
Tower
Tower is a GUI for Git to make things a little easier. I can either use the commandline or Tower to control Git. Sometimes Tower is quicker than commandline, sometimes not. But it is a great tool to have in my belt.
MAMP
MAMP is how I run Apache, PHP, and SQL on my local computer. It basically makes my computer into a personal server that I can build applications and CMS's without having to rely on paid hosting
Transmit
FTP is a common use in web development. There are other ways to transfer files but sometimes you have to use FTP. Transmit is the best FTP client I have ever used.
iOS Simulator
https://developer.apple.com/xcode/
iOS Simulator is built into Xcode (used to make iOS and OSX apps) and is a great resource for testing webpages on iOS without an actual device. It makes it quick and easy.
Trello
Trello is my main project manager. It is free and very powerful to get organized especially on big projects. It is story/card based which makes it easy to break down things as much as I need.