Your Mind On Tools

Keeping your design projects on track is a job in and of itself.

As a designer, it’d be fantastic to just focus on doing the work you love, the actual design work, but whether you’re a freelancer or working for an agency, there’s always a lot more to it than that.

You’ve got to manage everything from understanding your client’s goals, keeping the project on track when the inevitable hurdles arise, and maintaining solid communication between you, your team, and the client.

Fortunately, this is 2016 baby, and there are piles of tools out there to assist you from planning to completion.

Below you’ll find 10 dare-I-say killer apps to reduce the headaches and let you focus more on producing the awesome designs you’re known for!

Let’s dive in.

1. XMind

Mind Mapping FTW

Every creative knows “the process” begins by gathering ideas and requirements, then using those as fuel for a brainstorming session that rains awesome plans.

XMind is a mind mapping tool that lets you capture all your ideas in an intuitive way, clearing a path for those storms of brain activity.

It works on any desktop OS and lets you organize not only your thoughts but also any supporting resources in a variety of styles, diagrams, and designs.

From simple mind maps to tree charts and fishbone diagrams, XMind can capture and display your ideas in the way that makes the most sense to you.

You can also add images, icons, links, and multimedia to your maps to gather and organize all the information you need in one place.

And it’s sharing features make it easy for you to work with the rest of your team or show your clients the direction the project is heading.

Best of all, XMind is completely free and open source, so getting started couldn’t be easier.

2. Create Brief

Planning is Beautiful

We’ve all had those clients that simply refuse to be satisfied with our work.

But with a bit of effort in the planning stages, it’s easy to avoid these hassles by getting to a shared vision early.

Create Brief is a cool little app that lets you easily create and share a design brief template to quickly capture your client’s vision in a simple and beautiful way.

In less than 10 minutes, you can outline everything from the project’s primary color to the values to be communicated and the desired look and feel to ensure that when it’s time to get to work, you’ve really understood what your client is looking for.

Avoiding the hassles of unhappy clients and endless rework couldn’t be simpler with a design brief template from Create Brief.

Oh, and it’s free too.

3. Evernote

Capture Everything!!

At every stage of your design projects, you’ve got to be able to capture your ideas quickly and organize them in an intuitive way.

Evernote is the note storing app that captures your ideas a thousand different ways — from text to pictures, audio notes, and even web pages through their web clipper.

Wherever you are, whatever device you’re on, Evernote has a way for you to take notes.

When it comes to the incredible things you can do with Evernote, the sky is the proverbial limit.

One of the best features of Evernote is that it doesn’t leave you hanging with a jumbled mess of all the things you’ve captured with it (because you will start to capture everything).

You can create notebooks to organize your projects, tools, resources, whatever you want, and use their tag system to label to your heart’s content.

And don’t be afraid to create a million tags and notebooks, with a search function rivaling the all mighty Google, you can find your notes by tag, notebook, content type, date created, and more to quickly find whatever you need.

Evernote is free to get started with, and they offer Plus and Premium plans to tack on more features once you become a junkie.

In the best sense of the word.

4. SlickPlan

It’s Chartastic

Once you’ve brainstormed some ideas and captured your client’s vision in a design brief template, it’s time to get into some serious nuts and bolts planning.

Created with designers in mind, SlickPlan lets you do just that with their super simple tool to quickly make sitemaps and flowcharts.

The web-based application enables you to put together sitemaps and plan user interactions with flowcharts fast, wherever you are.

Start by scraping an existing site, uploading your other designs, or come up with something from scratch — you’ve got options.

With the click of a button, you can add new pages to your design and use the sidebar with a list of every element to quickly move, edit, or delete individual pages.

SlickPlan comes free of charge and bells and whistles, instead choosing a clean and simple interface designed to do one thing really well — let you create an elegant chart beautiful enough to share with your clients in no time flat (well, it will probably take you some time).

5. Trello

To Do, Doing, Done.

Once you’ve captured all those ideas and planned your general strategy, you’ll need help staying on track — a way to gather everything that needs to get done outside of your head and organize it in a way that the work flow.

If you’re a fan of Kanban style workflow, then Trello is the app for you.

If you have no idea what that is, Kanban is a planning method that organizes all your tasks in columns according to what stage of the process they’re in, the simplest version of this being “To-Do,” “Doing,” and “Done.”

Fast and flexible — even fun — Trello lets you create separate boards for all of your projects and create separate cards (tasks) and workflows for each, then easily rearrange as needed with their drag and drop interface.

Make your plans awesome by adding due dates, task details, checklists, labels, and comments to your cards, then share your boards with any team members working on the project.

Trello is available through their web app or from your Android (really?) or iOS (probably) device and free to use.

If you’re feeling snazzy, you can get Trello Gold for just $5 a month to add stickers and artful backgrounds to your cards and boards.

6. Basecamp

Climb to the Heights of Collaboration

If Kanban isn’t your thing, there are obviously loads of other project management apps out there, but Basecamp is one of the most elegant.

Basecamp lets you manage and collaborate on your projects through its impressive list of features including to-do lists, file sharing, message boards, milestones, time tracking, commenting and project overviews.

With one of the cleanest user interfaces out there and an exhaustive list of integrations with other apps, it’s become hugely popular with digital creatives of all persuasions.

Pricing starts at $24 a month and goes all the way to $149 if you find yourself getting into the whole project management thing.

7. Asana

For the Project Management Zen Master

Did I mention there are loads of project management apps out there?

If you’re a heavy hitting project manager in addition to being an awe-inspiring designer, then you should definitely check out Asana.

A hybrid task and project manager, Asana lets you capture and organize every single detail of your projects.

Everything is structured as a simple collaborative checklist, starting with project goals and milestones down to tasks, subtasks, and sub-subtasks.

Even sub-sub-subtasks. Every detail, every step.

Once you’ve tasked yourself out, don’t forget to add notes, links, tags, attachments, and comments as you get into the work, and organize everything by due date or dependencies for each project or for everything assigned to you.

Asana is free for up to 15 people to use and starts at $8.33 per person per month after that.

8. Slack

Really, you haven’t heard of Slack?!

We all remember the AIM days (or am I getting old?), messaging friends, coworkers, and maybe mom near instantaneously over this thing Al Gore invented called “The Internet.”

It seems instant messaging has been overtaken by social media and email, but the former isn’t super professional and the latter is invariably clogged and clunky.

Some say there’s a place where inboxes are empty, have you been there?

Fortunately for the rest of us, Slack has metaphorically “blown up” in the past couple of years.

For those who don’t know, Slack is the perfect hybrid of IM’s speedy communication, chat’s channel organization, and email’s attachment capabilities.

It’s a communication and collaboration platform that puts everything in one place — from links to attachments and emoji — and integrates with your favorite apps and tools.

Slack makes it easy to find what you need, when you need it.

Separate conversations into channels by project, team or topic.

Add links and attachments as needed.

And automate all your repetitive tasks (“yes [insert client name here] we’ve been working on your project today”) with Slack’s handy bots!

No more sifting through endless amounts of junk to find that one email your job is depending on.

Slack is free for everything you’ll need to use it for as a designer, with additional enterprise features available when your CEO gets into chat again.

9. Calendly

It’s Scheduled!

Scheduling meetings has to be one of the biggest pains in maintaining professional communication with your client.

Who wants to play email tag trying to find a time that works for everyone?

There’s designing to be done!

Thankfully Calendly is easy, beautiful software that takes the struggle out of matching schedules.

It integrates with your Google Calendar to both block off times you’ve got something planned and add new meetings when they’re set.

Calendly also lets you customize your appointment availability from the default 9–5, Monday through Friday to whatever works best for you.

Schedule one on one meetings for free, to remove the Calendly branding and coordinate the all team happy hour will cost you $10 a month.

10. Zapier

Automate. Everything.

Finally.

You’ve got all the ideas captured, plans are set, the project is sailing over the smooth seas of I’m-a-rock-star-designer bliss, and your clients are feeling satisfactorily included.

Now it’s time for a dash of automation to remove any traces of user error in your process.

Zapier is an awesome app that lets you connect just about every tool you use to one another for total world automation.

Facebook, Evernote, Gmail, Dropbox, Asana, FreshBooks, MailChimp, and 104 other services are all available in Zapier to turn actions in just about any app you use into triggers for actions in other apps, automagically.

Your first 5 Zaps are free, and paid plans start at $20 a month.

And the list goes on…

Not here, though. We’re done for today.

This is just a taste of the infinite ocean of tools out there to help you keep your design projects on track.

Hopefully we’ve been able to provide a brief bit of respite on the stormy seas of professional creation.

So relax a little, take a short break.

When you come back, you’ll be able to make up the time when you put some of the tools here to work.

Enjoy the (relative) serenity.