I'm thrilled to be living in a time, where we have so many great applications for designers and developers. Our nature of work and technology is changing constantly and so are the tools. My Photoshop workflow is driven by many awesome tools and I'm going to share them with you. Some of them are free and some for a small fee.
bjango Photoshop Actions & Workflows - Free
These are very useful Photoshop actions that were created to help us do repeated task faster. Every time we start a UI design document we have to specify not to have the document color managed. With bjango actions we just click the action Don’t Color Manage and everything else is done for us. There’s also a Dribble selection, Scaling for retina, Slicing layers, rotating, custom tools panel, etc…
GuideGuide - Free
Most of the time we start designing with a grid that consists out of columns and rows. The plugin comes to our rescue with lots of options to set up grids with guides.
CSS3Ps Photoshop plugin - Free
When we are designing in Photoshop we have to transfer that design to the web. For that we use CSS3 that helps us style elements on the web. The plugin is a cloud-based service that converts our layers in Photoshop to CSS3 code, that we can then copy and paste into our webpage. It’s especially useful if we don’t know how to convert a specific style into CSS3.
Kuler - Free
Adobe kuler is a plugin that helps us create color harmonies or choose between existing themes and export those colors to Photoshop. It’s a great tool when choosing colors for our project.
FontShop - Free
Ever wondered how the big heading in our composition would look like with different fonts? We don’t want to pay a fortune to buy a font and then see it doesn’t fit. Well the plugin does exactly that, it converts our text layer to the desired font as an image for free! We can then make sure that the font is the right choice and buy it.
DevRocket - $10
DevRocket is a Photoshop plugin for iOS developers. It helps us create documents for iPhone or iPad design, rotate canvases and icon designs. It’s of great help if we do iOS design.
WebZap - $15
WebZap creates quick mock-ups for web designs. We can choose different layouts, navigations, UI elements and more. When done with the design it gives us options to export it to a render of an iPad or web browser. Taking those renders to our clients ensures a better presentation of the design.
These are just a few tools that save me time when doing the designs. The list is not meant to show every tools that’s out there, just the few that I use most often. If you have any new tools that might be of interest, post it in the comments bellow and I’ll review it.
Jure Stern is a Freelance Front-end Web Developer from Slovenia. He worked at a startup in Canada and is now living his dream of being a freelancer. He's working with clients and agancies from UK and around the world.