I’ve recently been hired as a contracted UX designer for a development/design studio down in the Carolina’s! It’s crazy to me how much I’ve already learned in a very little amount of time.

Since I’ve been working as a freelance designer I’ve kind of been hacking my way through things. It wasn’t until recently where I started diving into improving my organization as a designer and find other ways to improve my current skill set.

I’m the last person to tell you I know everything because I’m always looking at ways I can improve (if you have any tips please say hi 👏 in the comments!)

Since I’ve never collaborated on a project with other designers before I wanted to learn how designers on teams communicated and what type of workflow did they follow.

Here’s a list of the new software I’ve picked up during the first week.

Abstract: Github for designers. Work on your designs in sketch and then “commit” those changes in Abstract. You will have a history of all the commits you’ve pushed so if you ever need to reference an old design you can. Really cool product and I’ve implemented it with some of the freelance projects I’m juggling right now. Harvest: Time/hour tracking app. Great way to see how long you’re working on projects and to keep track of your hours. Asana: Is a team organizer essentially. Just dove into the platform but they have a really nice UI and some pretty cool features to mess with. For instance, you can integrate Harvest into Asana so you can easily start tracking the amount of time you work on a task/tasks.

As an organizer instead of Asana I was using Notion, but I like how Asana offers more “team” collaboration.

Abstract up until this point I’ve never heard of and part of the reason is due to me not having any experience working with other designers on a project. I’m really happy I discover this app, it really makes things easy when it comes to collaboration.

Harvest is a really good tool for tracking your hours. I highly suggest taking a look at it.