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What It Is: Apple's version of PowerPoint, Keynote is software for creating presentations, available on the iPad and Mac.
Why It's Indispensable: "Keynote, which I use on my MacBook Pro, is great for sharing designs and concepts to larger audiences. You can very quickly create click-through prototypes that exhibit great animation and transitions. People are even making great motion graphics that look like something from After Effects (see Linda Dong's recent work)," says Josh Bloom, VP of design at Skully. Sandijs Ruluks, founder of Froont, puts it more succinctly: "Design is only one side of the equation. For telling the 'why' behind a design, I turn to Keynote.
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What It Is: A social network for professionals.
Why It's Indispensable: "Obviously LinkedIn is a great place for finding a new job, but it’s also a good resource for staying connected to the design community," writes Jason Broughton, head of user experience at Zappos. " Clichéd aspirational image posts aside, it’s easy to find a group having in-depth conversations on design. We’re currently following a great thread on the evolution of personas."
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What It Is: The latest version of Google's mobile operating system, available on smartphones, tablets, wearables, and even the occasional laptop.
Why It's Indispensable: Charles Fulford, group creative director at Huge, says he couldn't live without Lollipop's Priority Mode. "Priority Mode allows me to turn off all but extremely important notifications on my phone," he says. According to Fulford, good work requires focused time. "I constantly see clients in meetings staring at their phones every 23 seconds. Listening, and the natural empathy that accompanies it, are core tools to great design. Priority Mode clears the airwaves during frenetic days."
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What It Is: Mindmapping software for the iPhone, iPad, and the Mac.
Why It's Indispensable: "A MindNode diagram is like a subway map to me, and the design helps us navigate through our work," explains Jannie Lai, head of UX at Light. "I use this app to capture all things big and small—everything from concept models and design hierarchy, and all the way down to specific gestures and features. It provides a bird's-eye view of our work. As designers respond more to visuals than a text document, I find it to be an effective tool for planning and communication."
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What It Is: A designer-centric sketchbook app for iPad.
Why It's Indispensable: "I like to start any design work with a sketch. My favorite app for this is Paper by FiftyThree as it’s easy to generate new concepts that can be shared with the team," says Shaun Tollerton, Product Designer at ustwo.
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What It Is: Adobe's legendary photo-editing and retouching software.
Why It's Indispensable: "Once I’m confident with a sketch or concept I will use Photoshop to bring the design to life," writes Shaun Tollerton, product designer at ustwo. "Yes it’s a very bloated tool, but it does what I need it to do with ease. All design elements are vector-based too so that the design can be scaled easily.
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What It Is: A popular social network based off of online bookmarking.
Why It's Indispensable: "This is hardly an underground app, but I’ve been surprised at how often I come back to it," explains Charles Fulford, group director at Huge. "Like the elusive blue whale, free time and inspiration both surface quickly and stick around for a short time, so the ability to access Pinterest from any device (and even effortlessly from Chrome plugins) makes this an ever present and ever expanding design museum without walls." Jason Broughton, head of user experience at Zappos, agrees: "You’d be hard pressed to find a designer who hasn’t used Pinterest for a project."
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What It Is: A cross-platform app for creating 100% native prototypes, no matter what device you're on—even wearables.
Why It's Indispensable: "At the moment, we're working on creating watch faces for Android Wear, so I’ll use Pixate to prototype due to its support for the platform," writes Shaun Tollerton, product designer at ustwo. "This allows me to validate proposed designs and test their functionality."
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What It Is: An open-source programming language for new media art, electronics arts, and visual design projects.
Why It's Indispensable:"It lets me quickly explore design possibilities in code," says Raphaël de Courville, ART+COM Studios. "When necessary, it can scale to develop more complex installations. I like that it offers the quick feedback loop necessary for the iterative creation process I'm used to."
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What It Is: A statistical computing environment, useful for making data visualizations.
Why It's Indispensable: "Although technically not a 'design app,' it’s irreplaceable for me. I make data graphics and R is good at handling data. There’s a substitute for everything else I use," says Nathan Yau, founder of FlowingData.
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What It Is: A user interface and icon design tool.
Why It's Indispensable: "Everyone in the design team relies on Skala to look at their work real-time on their phones," says Jannie Lai, head of UX at Light. "We want to make sure our design looks right in a high-pixel density screen, but we also make sure it is comfortable to use."
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What It Is: An easy-to-use UI/UX design app.
Why It's Indispensable: "Sketch on my MacBook Pro handles wire framing and visual design with equal aplomb. It's deeply vector-based and has a ton of great features to output various sizes of design assets without lots of work," explains Josh Bloom, VP of design at Skully. Joe Stewart, co-founder of Work & Co. agrees, although he points out that the app is only really good for designing iPhone apps. "They don't seem to care much about supporting Android, which seems idiotic to me," he says.
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What It Is: A cross-platform team communication tool based around persistent chat rooms.
Why It's Indispensable: Amazingly, Slack was the app mentioned by more of the designers we polled than any other. Charles Fulford, group creative director at Huge, chalks it up to the fact that collaboration and communication are key for any design work. "Having all accounts and projects organized and searchable under one roof and accessible from any device helps soothe daily chaos," he says. "The ability to check comps within Slack and give instant feedback keeps projects moving. Also, third-party integrations provide seamless workflow. For example, Box gives access to all project files—from briefs to research to wireframes to comps. Slackbot even retrieves a daily feed of inspiration from Product Hunt."
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TEXTMATE
What It Is: A graphical text editor for OS X, specializing in code and markup.
Why It's Indispensable: "Text editors are my most used type of app. I use them for everything from keeping track of my ideas to writing code," says Ryder Ripps, creative director at OKFocus. "To be honest, I have used many text editors, so I don't really care that much about which one I use: TextMate gets the most use, but I used to use BBEdit, Text Wrangler, and Notepad, too."
Source: fastcodesign
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