I like to define myself as a full stack engineer who knows some design. On large enterprise projects, I usually play the role of architect, and on personal or open source projects I work on, I become a full-stack designer. I like to use my self-taught design skills to design websites or apps, and then implement the front end and back end myself. This helps me to effectively save costs and reduce work efficiency problems caused by multiple communication. But I also know that I can not master as many design skills as those real designers, and make very good work. What I can do is on the one hand to improve my understanding of design through self-study, on the other hand, I will carefully select design tools to make up for my lack of design skills as much as possible. (Both are important. If you’re a programmer like me who is interested in design, read my previous post “Teach Yourself Design: Are You Really Getting started?” , which describes my self-learning design experience, methods and some understanding.

Tools update quickly, but the right tool selection ideas can be used for a long time. I have a set of tool selection strategies, which mainly include the following four points:

  1. Simple and modern: Choose tools designed for a single task to increase productivity by eliminating noise at work.
  2. Have a good reputation and influence, and have a good community support: learning any software tool takes time or money, so choose software or tools that are worth the investment to buy and learn.
  3. Light enough: I always have to have a lot of software running at the same time, and having light tools makes my system run faster, which is great for my productivity and development experience.
  4. Can you afford it, or can you find… : technical craftsmen support legal ^_^

Here are some of the tools I use:

Design tools

Sketch 3

Sketch is a UI design tool that meets all four of my criteria. Sketch is only a few tens of megabytes, it’s much smaller than Photoshop, and more importantly it’s designed for UI design. I don’t have to focus on image manipulation that has nothing to do with my UI design, which reduces the noise in my work environment. In addition, through the powerful plug-in function, I can install and use according to the need, which greatly improves my work efficiency.




Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer is fast, smooth and accurate vector graphic design software for Mac. You can use it for advertising, ICONS, UI, or concept art. Received an average of 5 stars from over 2,500 app store ratings worldwide — and was an “Editor’s Pick” from the start, being featured as one of the best new apps of 2014, And won the coveted Apple Design Award at apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2015 for its stunning performance and functionality.




Framer

There are a lot of tools for prototyping, like Flinto, Principle, Orrigmi, etc., but I use very few of them. But if I had to recommend it, I’d go with Framer Studio, because it allows me to use JavaScript code to control motion, which appeals to me.




PaintCode

You can use PaintCode to do graphic design easily. You can also import SVG or PSD files into PaintCode, which can then help you convert your design into Objective-C,Swift or C# code.




Hype 3 Professional

I usually only use simple animations on websites or apps, but if you want to do some really cool animations on your website or App, you can use Hype. He can easily design dynamic effects and export them to HTML 5 code.




Pixave 2

Designers need to constantly collect excellent design works to improve their design sense. I’ve been using Ember, but it’s no longer in production and it doesn’t support some of the latest formats like Sketch,Affinity Designer, etc. A good alternative is Pixave 2, which supports almost all design-related file formats.




Iconjar

As a designer, you must also have a large collection of icon materials. But you often find it hard to find an icon when you really need to. Iconjar can help you solve this problem. You can import and label your ICONS, and you can quickly locate the ICONS you want through Iconjar’s search function.




Sip for Mac and iPhone

Sip is a great iOS app that helps you create color swatches from photos. And you can use it to capture those beautiful colors anytime, anywhere on your Mac or phone.




Development class tools

Sublime Text 3

This is the IDE I use to develop front-end code. I really liked the themes that made the code so clean, and the feature-rich plug-ins. Developing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with it has become a pleasure.




Eclipse

Eclipse is the back-end JAVA development IDE I’ve been using, and it still pales in comparison to the commercially available Intellij, which I recommend partly because I’ve been using it and partly because it’s free.




Dash

Dash is very helpful for developers. I can view technical documents such as Angular, Swift, CSS and so on offline. This allows me to work even with poor network conditions and greatly improves my productivity.




Efficiency tools

Alfred

Alfred is the most efficient use of the Mac I’ve ever seen. Alfred does everything from translating an English word to searching for a file to launching a local development environment with a single command. Alfred can do most of the repetitive work for you.




CheatSheet

CheatSheet is one of my favorite gadgets, any popular software will have a heap of shortcut set, through this tool, you only need to press ⌘ long, the software all the shortcuts will be displayed in front of you, you go back without one by one, just check a few times repeatedly, you naturally able to skillfully use the shortcut key.




Fantastical

I use Fantastical to quickly track my TOdo entries and set reminders. Instead of writing down every small action item every day, I only write down the most important ones, because that would overwhelm me and distract me. I prefer to work in a natural and soothing environment.




Day One

I returned to the software after I started writing. What impressed me most about it was how quickly I could open the software on my Mac and record a new idea. I believe that good ideas are fleeting, and you need to write them down as quickly as possible, or they will leave you forever.




Ulysses 2.0

This is my favorite MarkDown writing software. The best feature is that I can break an article into sections and write only that section in the editor, which helps me stay focused. In addition, it supports the export of various file formats, such as HTML,PDF,Word and so on, so THAT I can easily publish my articles to different platforms.




Screenflow

Screenflow is the best screencapture app I’ve ever used. You can use your own shortcut keys to capture and edit screen images. It also supports video recording and post-production, such as adding subtitles and animation effects. So I’m going to use it for some video tutorials as well.




LiceCap

This is a small free app that allows you to set up an area on the screen and then use LiceCap to quickly record giFs. Direct and efficient is my evaluation of it.




Unibox

I have several email accounts that I check daily for different jobs. I’ve tried several Mac clients, including the highly acclaimed AirMail, but found myself having problems with domestic mail in one way or another until I found Unibox, which is really handy, and very intuitive and easy to process, organized by session.




Baidu cloud

This is the home I have used the best network disk, its use interface is very intuitive, the operation is also very simple. I use it to share documents, blueprints or other information with clients.




If you have any Mac tools of your own, please share them in the comments

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