If you work as a web designer or web developer then you know life can be pretty hectic. Here at Jacit our days are a constant battle between client meetings, managing accounts, internal meetings, analysing data & statistics and collaborating on projects. Being part of this fast-paced industry can leave you feeling tired and exhausted. That’s why we believe it’s important to make things as efficient and productive as possible. To achieve this we have a set of tools we use daily which we have listed below.
98.3% of all of our design work here at Jacit ends up in Adobe Photoshop one way or another. The majority of our web designs start life on pen and paper and then are quickly imported into Photoshop to be fleshed out as detailed design mockups ready for client approval (or rejection). Photoshop allows us to play around with different elements which helps us to create a variety of designs quickly and efficiently.
It can be difficult deciding what text editor to use, especially when there’s so many of them out there. When it comes to text editors a lot of them are very similar, but ultimately the main thing you want from a text editor is efficiency. We tried out a lot of different ones before settling with Sublime Text, and we recommend you do the same. The most important thing is to choose one that matches your current workflow. There are two main reasons why we fell in love with Sublime Text, the first is its simplistic UI and the second is its lightning speed. For us these are two key factors which really helped to increase our productivity and efficiency.
If you work as part of a team or on large scale projects then you’ll know that version control is a MUST. The ability to have different versions (or branches) of a project and to be able to rollback & undo changes is a life saver. One of the most popular version control systems, and the one we use, is called Git. Git is very comprehensive and there’s a lot of documentation out there if you want to read up on it. Git has proven to be a necessity for us as we use it in every one of our projects.
For us having the ability to access our files from anywhere is a must, especially if we’re out of the office or travelling to and from client meetings. Drive also makes it effortless for us to collaborate with each other, which is another necessity as most of our projects overlap.
One of the key tools which makes our processes and work more streamlined is without a doubt Trello. Trello is surprisingly versatile considering it’s simplicity. For the majority of the time we use Trello as an online digital scrum board. If you’re not familiar with a scrum task board click the link here to read up on them. It’s a great project management tool which we use daily. We have individual boards for each of our projects which are broken down into cards, or tasks. It allows us to keep track of our progress and with little effort, we’re able to keep up to date with what each team member is working on. It’s versatility and flexibility is great for our industry as projects often evolve and change over time.