house design for mac

- today, i wanna tell you about a bunch of really useful free tools that are part of my design process. (upbeat music) this video right here is another in my tech for designers series. i've already made videosabout the hardware that i use and about the design softwares, subscriptions that i useas part of my process

but today i wanna tell you about a bunch of reallycool little free things that maybe you might find useful to add to your process as well. the first one is a littleapp called paparazzi. this is used for taking fullpage screenshots of websites. as part of my process, wheni'm working with a developer on a site being built, when i wanna give feedback, ilike to take a full screenshot

using paparazzi of thesite in its build mode and then i upload it to invision and click in places to leave comments and feedback for the developer. it's a really useful way of doing it and paparazzi is how itake those screenshots. all you have to do is put a link in and it'll take the image for you and you can change the size of it as well.

so this is how i get imagesof what the site looks like on mobile, on tablet and on a desktop. next up is a little toolthat lives in my top bar. it's a color picker and it's called sip. the purpose of this toolis that you can click anywhere on your screen andit'll give you a color code for whatever you clicked on. so it's really usefulif you see a nice color used on a website andyou don't wanna bother

going into the dev toolsto figure out what it was. sip can help you out with that. when you click on a color as well, it automatically saves the hex code or whatever you've set as the default to your clipboard as well making it really easy to go ahead and use that color in your own design. next is a chrome extension

that i find myself usingwhen i really like a font that i've seen used on anotherwebsite and that is whatfont. when you have this extension selected, you just have to click on apiece of text on a website and it'll load this little window telling you all the details about what font you're looking at, what size it is, what color it is. it's really useful.

you could find out allthis information of course by going into the developer tools but it's much easierto just do it this way. next up, two toolsyou'll already know about if you watched my last videoabout exporting assets for web but they deserve a mention in here too. these are two toolsfor compressing images. the first one is anapp called image optim. this is really handy becauseyou just have to drag

an image file into it and it'llcompress the heck out of it. it'll then just saveover your original file with one that is a lot smallerbut still good quality. and the next one you coulduse for this is tinypng. now, like i said in my last video, i end up not using thisone so much anymore but this is a really handy website that you can just drag an image up to it and it's gonna compress it a lot for you

then you can download it anduse that asset in your website. i prefer image optim because it does the whole saving over the original thing whereas with this one, youhave to download the image and then find it in yourdownloads folder again but still, it's a really useful tool. the next one is toggl and thisis an app for time tracking. i quite like tracking my timebecause it gives me a view of how long i'm spending on each project

and time tracking is especially important for client projects'cause you wanna make sure even if you're not building by the hour that you're aware of howlong the project is taking so that maybe you can learn for next time if you haven't quite scoped it out right. there's many time tracking tools out there but toggl is my favoritebecause i like how it's designed and i like its option to have categories

and add clients, et cetera. the next one is also related to time. it's an app called focus keeper. now, i debated whetheror not to include this because it does actually cost one pound 49 in the uk app store so it'sprobably 99 cents in the us one but it's so cheap that it's almost free so i thought that itcould fit into this video. i really love using this tofocus my time hence its name.

i use something calledthe pomodoro technique when i really wanna findsome focus on a project. it's basically a technique of working where you work solidly for 25minutes with no interruptions and then you have a five minute break to deal with all that checking twitter and making a cup of tea that you wanted to doduring those 25 minutes so it's a really good way of working.

it works out well for me and focus keeper is areally nicely designed app that helps you keep a timer on this and if you are opposedto paying for an app that will do that thenyou can use the website, tomatotimer to do the same thing but i just prefer the way focus keeper keeps track of how many you'vedone in a day, et cetera and i like its notifications.

this last one is gonna bereally handy if you're like me and find yourselfconstantly running out of hard drive space. it's called omnidisk sweeper and it's an app thatsweeps your hard drive and then arranges yourfiles in order of size. i find it really handy for figuring out which folders files are in that are sucking up a lot ofgigabytes on my hard drive

so i can go in and delete them or move them to a backup if necessary. those are all the tools thati have to tell you about today but i hope there's something in there that you might find useful toadd into your design process and if you've got anything like this that you think i might likeor find useful to know about then leave that down below in the comments 'cause this can go both ways.

thank you for watching this video. please give it a thumbsup if you enjoyed it. the best way to support my channel because i don't run ads on these videos is to go ahead and checkout my online store and pick yourself up a t-shirtor a notebook or a print. i design them all myself andin the case of the t-shirts, i print them myself too soi'm really proud of them and i think you'll like them.

thanks again for watchingand i will see you in my next video. bye.

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