Category:Tools

Design tools I love to use

Color

• Hex-to-RGB and RGB-to-Hex are quick color converters
• Paletton makes building a color palette easier, especially since it includes colorblindness tools
• WebAIM Color Contrast Checker is there to make sure your colors have accessible levels of contrast.

Code

• CanIUse tells you which browsers support the HTML/CSS/JS capabilities you want to use, so you can plan accordingly.

Converters

• Pandoc is a command-line tool for converting from one file format (such as HTML) to another (such as MediaWiki)

Deliverables

• Sketch is my preferred wireframing tool. That's a big deal, because I thought I'd probably wireframe in Photoshop or Visio (!!) for my whole career.
• Omnigraffle is my preferred every-other-diagram too. I do process flows, site maps, and everything else under the sun in it for work. For home I do everything from timelines (it's kind of hard for timelines) to sketches of the new deck, to family trees or "what is that neighbor's name?" maps.
• Asana is my preferred to-do / agile / kanban board. (It does both multi-column boards *and* plain lists.) It also will timeline things that have dates on them. I currently use it to track both my work responsibilities (through work boards that are funded) and my writing/fiction responsibilities (through a free board). When my Asana boards are up to date I feel like I have some bit of control over my life.