7 Best Designer Tools for Web and Graphic Design Professionals

First impressions count so having an attractive website is a crucial ingredient when it comes to attracting people to a business. Graphic and web designers play an important role in creating a company’s appeal. Today, there is a seemingly infinite number of tools available for graphic designers, making it increasingly harder to decide which is the right one for your requirements. With a variety of tools available for task management, design, and customer management, it may seem hard to decide which tools are best for your needs. So here, we will list 7 highly-recommended tools for web and graphic designers to help you make your choice. 

1. Adobe Photoshop

This is arguably the most well-known of all the tools, having been around since 1988, and is still a go-to for most designers. You may be accustomed to hearing or seeing its name on a daily basis, its use has become so prolific, but don’t let that diminish perceptions of it. Photoshop is an extremely powerful software that can allow you to grow your artistic style and fully realize your creative potential. Photoshop will provide you with countless tools, options, and settings to optimize all of your projects. Photoshop is also very good at building up confidence in its users’ design abilities: it has step-by-step instructions, letting you create designs from your own drawings and improving efficiency when putting them together. It may be a veteran with its name synonymous with a digital design of any kind these days – but that’s for the simple reason that it’s still one of the best graphic design tools on the market and has built itself a rock-solid reputation. 

2. Adobe Dreamweaver

Supporting HTML, CSS, Javascript, and much more, Dreamweaver is still a highly popular tool among web designers. It provides the speedy creation and publication of web pages from virtually anywhere, for any device or browser. Some highlight features include building from scratch and being able to preview your design and the site’s progress in real time. Extremely capable, well-equipped with all the tools necessary, it’s not the easiest software for newcomers to get to grips with, but for those willing to invest the time into learning and for those with experience, Adobe Dreamweaver delivers robust, fast, responsive websites. 

3. Sketch

Sketch has been created especially for Mac OS users. This tool is excellent for the design and creation of smooth user interfaces across the whole spectrum. It’s a relatively straightforward tool, but that doesn’t mean its capabilities are diminished – this is a powerful tool for designers. Some key features include the ability to extend its functionality with ecommerce plug-ins that can increase the productivity and supply everything your toolkit could need for top-quality UI building. 

4. SelfCAD

SelfCAD is a designer tool that has been created for users who would like to create 3D Graphics. Preparing 3D assets in common graphic design software like Photoshop is challenging. But with a 3D modeling software like SelfCAD, you can easily prepare 3D models, both simple and complex with much ease. Additionally, if you would like to prepare prototypes, you can slice your models in SelfCAD and prepare them for 3D printing without having to switch to another program. This makes it easier for you to prepare your prototypes without having to switch between different programs.

5. Vectornator 

Vectornator is a vector-based graphic design software for creating illustrations, layout mockups and lettering. Vectornator works perfectly across all Mac devices, whether it’s an iPhone or an iMac – creating stunning artwork takes no time at all. Vectornator is also completely free, easy to use for novices and seasoned designers alike. This tool comes with PDF-editing features and various templates for social media, icons and images as well as visual design templates. UI design and print design is also possible with Vectornator. This design tool allows for complete design freedom wherever you are, and whatever device you’re on. 

6. Desynger

Based online, Desynger is a great easy-to-use illustrator. One-click and drag-and-drop mean you can combine elements and build and revise your designs with both speed and simplicity. Desynger comes with Pandora’s box of royalty-free images for you to play around with and customize. As well as this, it comes with other features, which are equally as generous, such as hundreds of templates, fonts, shapes, and icons. It also provides library options so that you can organize your designs, palettes, fonts, and images, making them easily findable whenever you may want to reuse them. A PDF editor is incorporated too, enabling fast edits of your projects anytime, anywhere.

7. Adobe Illustrator

Like its sister product Photoshop, Illustrator is one of the market giants and is a perennial big hitter. Just as Photoshop has been built for top-tier pixel-orientated image editing, Illustrator has been created for working specifically with vector graphics. Customizable and feature-packed, it’s almost a guarantee that designers will eventually find themselves habitually turning to Illustrator and it becoming a regular part of any design process. Illustrator’s Canvas will allow you to have thousands of resizable artboards for your work, as well as numerous features with time-saving capabilities. As you would hope, being a resolution-dependent tool, the output of prints is of consistent top quality. Adobe Illustrator’s reputation as being a market leader in the design of vector graphics is solid: leading up to 2022, it’s still set the benchmark by which all other peer design tools are judged.

8. PicsArt

PicsArt is likely to pop up in your mobile app store searches alongside Instagram and other social photo-related platforms, but don’t be deceived – PicsArt is not just another ‘crop and contrast’ app for your phone. PicsArt is a desktop image editing platform that is host to one of the largest online communities. Even for those with zero experience, PicsArt’s feature-heavy, infinite editing abilities mean it’s possible for novices to create extremely professional content. Intuitive UI (and surprising simplicity considering its capabilities) combine with every necessary tool to create successfully, whether it’s for social media or for online business marketing. PicsArt has become an infinite space for artistic creativity as new tools, effects, and filters are being rolled out and added to the stockpile all the time. Creating appealing, varied, utterly original, and stand-out work with art or photos couldn’t be simpler than with PicsArt. 

9. Iconscout

Iconscout- as the name suggests, it contains a huge stock of icons. This stunning site offers more than 3.2million icons and all those resources are contributed by the designers and artists from all over the world. It is designed to serve users with millions of design assets including icons, illustrations, 3d assets and Lottie animations. They also provide integrated tools, plugins, and editors. This helps you with varieties of assets with enough functionality for necessary modifications. You can create a free account to begin usingIconscout online directly in your web browser. You can also download the desktop app for your Mac or Windows device. 

10.Filestage

This simple web and graphic design tool is a stand-out due to its collaborative functionality. Filestage has been built for review-and-approve and makes for easy collaboration with stakeholders in regards to website creation, images, and PDFs. Its simple structure and ease of use mean that clients are able to give feedback within the project itself so that designers can then implement the requested changes, be it additions or removals. This close collaboration makes for a better final product and improves customer satisfaction at the end result. This collaborative effort also means that you can see who is suggesting changes and who has and has not approved the work.

11. Wisestamp email signature designer

This tool supplies easy wins for graphic designers or studios that set up digital assets for businesses. An email signature is nowadays one of the common deliverables, alongside a website, presentation template and newsletter design, and this tool expedites the design process. The Wisestamp email signature generator, negates the need for creating a validated email signature design for all the screen size variations, browsers, and email campaigns and  clients. WiseStamp provides a variety of email signature  template options and complete customizability with added features such as buttons, disclaimers, social media icons, and GIF animations.

If you are looking for some more tools, Cloudways has a fantastic post on the best web design tools that you can try out. 

To Wrap Up

Having great ideas of your own or being inspired by a company’s amazing task proposition is one thing, but you need the right tools to bring your imagination to the screen and execute your designs as well as possible. No toolkit will be the be-all and end-all to your artistic needs and preferences. Most designers will use a combination of them, either used in tandem or individually depending on the needs of the project. But with a decent set of recommended web and graphic design tools at your disposal, you’ll make your life easier – and your work more impressive.