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If you are a web experience designer, design tools are an integral part of your life. After all, managing the complex, ever-evolving design process is anything but easy.

Design tools ensure that your work landscape is clutter-free and optimized for quality work.

But the problem is with so many design tools being launched into the SaaS market space every day, choosing your ideal option is almost always an overwhelming experience. Moreover, every design tool claims to deliver the same features, performance, and experience.

The million-dollar question is how to solve this challenge.
Fret not. You have help.

Let’s unbox the power of tools that no designer can resist.

In this post, we will reveal the top five design tools that will make your design venture easier in 2021.

Top 5 Tools that a UI/UX Designer should have in their list in 2021

Every high-performance design tool has one core purpose: to streamline the design process. Be it user experience tools or user interface designing tools; if your toolkit is not capable of decluttering your design space, they are not doing their job well.

This means each of the tools that you choose need to be a master of their core activity. Be it driving more functional designs or improving the aesthetics for your end-users for mass adoption of your product, these tools must complement your potential as a designer.

The following section gives you a detailed view of all the top tools you can use to streamline your entire design process while improving the quality of your designs simultaneously. Let’s dive in.

1. Adobe XD

When it comes to user experience design tools, Adobe XD tops the chart for obvious reasons.

With its gen-next user experience, flexibility, and advanced features creating complex designs and workflows is a cakewalk. For maximum adoption, the software comes in both versions: Mac OS and Windows. The best part is you can now create your best designs only with voice control.

The tool has extended its capability and the process of importing files from other software simple, intuitive, and, more importantly, fast. This makes the development of responsive designs by any means, be it: recreate, alter, mockup, or from scratch is dirt simple.

Adobe XD packages come with different types of plans and pricing. We can say Adobe takes care of its users very well. Here are some of its features.

• Interoperability – XD It is just so compatible with other tools it auto connects with other tools like slack and Microsoft teams etc. It can move from macOS to windows.
• Voice Control – Ever thought that with the help of your voice, you could design? With the XD tool anything is possible. You can create your design by simply narrating the look of it. All you need for your best idea to take shape is to lend your voice.

Pros:

It comes with all types of artboards with tutorials to walk you through. Clean and clear designs provide you enough workspace to work and enhance your designs.

Cons:

If you wish to see a demo of the prototype of smartphones in real-time, it only works with macOS. You don’t have the option to customize geometric shapes.

2. Maze

Maze is all you need to bring your designs to life. It is a great tool for building as well as

Integrating an interactive and intuitive dashboard, the tools offer powerful features to make your design journey easy. No matter what stage of the design you are in, whether it’s wireframing, prototyping, or reiteration, Maze has got you covered. To do this, it uses the following features:

• User testing: It is critical for the overall success of the design. Without testing your design hypothesis on real users, optimizing user experience is like walking in the dark.
• Design collaboration: With Maze, you can easily collaborate on designs with your peers and mates and offer everyone the opportunity to access valuable insights that will further optimize the user experience. With this tool, you will be able to test, learn, and take action rapidly.

Pros:

Using Maze is an easy-to-use interface with a faster learning curve. It brings users a wide range of interactions with the internal designer or developer of a team. One more must-have feature that attracts users is its easy integration with the design tool Sketch.

Cons:

It would be great if there is more context in terms of instructional videos and also the fact that a few pieces are not editable, which makes it a little confusing for the tester. Though not a con, it would definitely be helpful if the tool offers branching options, such as a one-line questionnaire to add at least one project for both Android and iOS testers.

See More: Best Practices With Dark UI In Web Design

3. Figma

“Nothing great is brainstormed alone

Nothing great is designed alone

Nothing great is built alone

Nothing great is made alone.”

These taglines on the Figma website aptly describe the tool. This increasingly popular UI/UX design tool is used across the globe and gained lots of attention in the last few years. What sets Figma apart from other tools is the fact that it has taken the designers’ collaboration to a whole new level.

This online collaborative tool brings to you the design features that you have always loved, but with a better and more efficient workflow. It has been designed to make the web easy for everyone. With a simple interface and interactive dashboard, you can be up and running in minutes.

Let’s take a look at some of its most prominent features:

• Live share: Figma offers a platform for designers to collaborate with each other’s ideas and create one masterpiece. Isn’t this cool?
• Built-in commenting: It’s like your design file is a venue where anyone can come and have discussions about the designs. This helps a lot where many heads are involved in one single design.

Pros

Figma is free, and it’s cloud-based, so you can easily save your work and access it from anywhere around the world. It enables you to collaborate live on the dashboard and saves time that you would otherwise spend on downloading, making changes, and uploading it again.

Cons

As it’s cloud-based and runs in the browser itself, you might face an issue with caches.

4. Sketch

The sketch is the go-to design tool for all levels of designers to collaborate in the design process. From beginners to highly seasoned designers, everyone will find something to love about the software.

In Sketch, you can customize your toolbar based on your needs. Frequently used and hard to remember should get a place in this toolbar.

Sketch weighs around 45 MB, another huge plus when it comes to design tools as they are bulky in general. But that is not all. Don’t underestimate the artboard of Sketch, unlike other tools that save separate files for each screen which results in keeping multiple files open that messes with the designer’s brain.

Artboards come to our rescue, which saves our entire screen design file into one single Sketch file. Help us to easily track down progress and manage design files.

Looking into the list of features helped it to make it in this list.

• Custom templates: This software offers you a volley of pre-built templates that you can customize according to your design needs. Moreover, there are multifarious plugins that boost your design work. All you need is to install plugins.
• Easy access: Just like Google Drive, One Drive, in Sketch, you will be provided with storage. They have integrated cloud storage which makes accessing your file super easy from anywhere.

Pros:

You can get multiple results in one click, and that makes it a huge time-saver. Designers love to play with plugins; Sketch comes with over 1000 plugins. It lets you create easy designs with nested objects. It also requires less effort to integrate with other tools.

Cons:

It lacks an important feature which most designers wish to have —animations. Sad to hear this; it provides limited functionality over animations. When you go over 100 plugins, things start to get a little slow.

5. Envision Studio

When it comes to screen design, Invision is unbeatable.

With one of the most powerful and feature-rich dashboards, the software makes prototype designing simple, efficient, yet fast. No wonder it is gaining the fast attention of the global community of designers. But that is not all that the tool offers.

All of its power and efficiency come for free. It has a freemium model to get you started in the world of powerful designs. Sure, you can convert to the more powerful, premium features later.

Here are some of the features that you can see in this tool.

• Easy project management:  This tool comes with some uniquely capable features. You can save, access, and manage all your projects right from the tool. This boosts your productivity by a significant amount.
• Intuitive design:  The software is built for lean design development and rapid prototyping. With its super-intuitive drag and drop feature, building a custom design is just a few clicks away. What’s more? You can easily import external images from any source folder into your designs for maximum customization. But it goes beyond easy import. The tool provides yet another smart way of adding design, retrieving images from your cloud storage such as Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

Pros:

This tool provides a professional environment for both clients and projects that streamlines management. Get URLs for sharing your projects across multiple teams, which speed up your project and decrease misalignment on design changes.

Cons:

There are a few issues with sync. Tools consume a lot of resource of browser resources, and as a result, your efficiency decreases. You need a system with powerful RAM.

Also, You Can Read Best Blogging Tools Every Blogger Should Know in 2021

Bonus Tools

The above tools are sure to create the most productive design execution process. But what about the tools that a designer needs to optimize their creations? Processes like audience insights, information architecture design, and more?

The following tools ensure that your complete design process is elevated to produce the desired results. Further, this will provide you with end-to-end design help for your complete venture.

1. Google Analytics is your go-to tool if you would like to know your audience better. With a super-intuitive dashboard giving you rich insights on how well your designs perform with your designers, this tool cannot be missed from your toolkit. From traffic analysis, content engagement, channel engagement to keyword analysis, there are very skimp insights that this tool does not cover.
2. Flow Map is your tool if you would like to have a smooth content flow. It is more like a map creation tool that allows the creation of different geometric shapes. It will help the designer to optimize the flow of the content and information architecture for maximum logical cohesion and superior end-user experience.
3. Survey Monkey is your tool. In a time of feedback currency, collecting responses about your designs from real users is the most powerful asset for improving your designs. Survey Monkey champions this need. Creating surveys and condensing insights from them is a breeze with this tool.
4. Another tool that you can use to test your designs is Usabilla. Capturing feedback from real-time users, this tool is a powerful way to create a lean design development process. With features like multi-device accessibility and voice reminder, this never lets you down.

Check Out the Quick Video Review On Best UI/UX Design Tools For The Modern-Day Designer

Source: GraphicMama

Conclusion

A UI designer’s toolkit needs to be well-balanced. This is the best way to achieve high-quality designs that are both functional, creative, and easy on the eyes.

The above UI design tools are sure to leverage your design process, realizing your best ideas in record time. However, the core job still stands with you.

At the core of winning designs lies the audience whom you are designing for. This means, even your toolkit can be finalized on the basis of the needs of your audience. This makes audience empathy a core task of every design process. So now that you know every aspect of choosing a design tool, there is just one question left to answer.

What tools from the above list are you planning to integrate into your design toolkit?

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Dark UI is an elegant, impressive, and striking presentation. It should therefore come as no surprise that it has become vastly popular all over the internet. The growing popularity will tempt many designers to join the trend. Still, before doing so, they need to understand how dark mode should be properly designed and implemented and what attributes should and should not be applied in its use.

Ultimately, for a design to be successful, it must focus on generating the look and feel. Still, the presentation varies based on the website, the audience it aims to reach, and the product or service it is trying to sell. In some cases, a dark mode UI might be just what the website needs, but on the other hand, a certain dark mode could have the opposite of the desired effect.

Whether you’re a self-employed web designer or work in one of the top companies specializing in UI design, it’s crucial to understand modern trends. Dark UI is one of the most popular web design trends today, so if you neglect it, you may be left in the dust of your competitors. Just make sure you understand this one thing: web design agencies and web designers worldwide are taking advantage of this trend because it helps create some novel and exciting user experiences.

Let’s explore some design practices that websites use when implementing a dark mode UI. This should help increase understanding of how to more effectively use dark mode in your upcoming design initiatives.

Use Negative Space

Dark mode intends to exude the feeling of ‘heaviness’ accomplished by using negative space, a term used to define the space around the design’s existing elements. In a typical design, this ‘white space’ may not be thought of as particularly important, but it is pivotal when designing using dark mode UI.

That is because white space’ is the visual tool that defines the layout, organization, and hierarchy of a design, serving as a powerful navigational tool for viewers. It also serves as an essential means of resting one’s eyes. For those reasons, achieving the perfectly balanced ratio between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ spaces is essential to effective and tidy designs.

Human minds are naturally drawn to elements with ample negative space around them as it triggers the sense of the element’s importance and richness. The element with lots of negative space is subconsciously interpreted as being grouped separately from other elements due to its importance, instinctively drawing eyes to it.

For this reason, the balancing of positive and negative spaces can be the difference between a successful or a failed design. Designers need to consider the relationship between multiple letters or elements on display and how much breathing room’ each one needs. However, while lack of ample negative space will make a design look clunky and crowded, it is vital to remember that using excessive negative space will give the design a look of incompletion.

Enhancing Visual Content

Dark mode best practices are overall tailored around providing emphasis on the visual content. The dark mode is great when used with websites aimed at capturing the viewer’s attention as the heaviness of darker background make the elements present on the page ‘pop,’ helping to pull the viewer’s eyes to visuals of various colors and shapes, graphics, images or videos present on the site set against the high-contrast backdrop.

Color is one of the most effective methods in contrasting the elements present from the rest of the page. Brighter and lighter elements stand out more against dark backgrounds, which controls the design’s visual hierarchy by demanding the viewers focus their eyes on the elements first and foremost. A well-designed site using dark mode should seamlessly guide the viewer’s eyes to the important elements.

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Boost Emotional Branding

Aside from helping the page not look cluttered, a dark mode UI’s use of negative space can also invoke a strong emotional response. One of the reasons has to do with the psychological aspects of color, with each one invoking a different psychological response from viewers. These responses trigger a particular set of feelings, which direct the viewer’s emotions. These emotions will be a significant factor in any decisions that the viewer makes while at the site.

This has been an area of study, with research finding that black color is commonly linked to perceptions of power, authority, stability, and exude strength. Alongside power and control, black is also linked with symbolizing independence, drama, intelligence, sophistication, mystery, and elegance. As its power convention cannot be understated, black is a powerful color used as a background to contrast and encourage large, high-contrast imagery, yielding stunning visual results.

Whether most viewers recognize it or not, this type of strategy is commonly used to set the mood on many entertainment and product selling websites. While the dark mode is a very effective strategy, it is imperative to use it and pair it with those color schemes that evoke the image that the site’s brand wants to be associated with.

Boost the Site’s Usability

Dark mode can also be effectively used in enhancing the user-friendliness of application design. Many apps are designed for heavy nighttime use and therefore operate more effectively with a dark color scheme that helps reduce eye strain and fatigue. This is one of the primary reasons Amazon Prime, Netflix, and other entertainment apps, make heavy use of dark mode UIs. Some apps, like Google Maps, automatically toggle to dark mode during the nighttime hours, while many other apps present users with preference or settings options that include switching to dark mode manually.

Apps and sites that aim to showcase images typically use dark mode more often. For instance, Spotify uses a dark background to accentuate the high-resolution album covers, much like Netflix sets crisp movie and show graphics against a dark palette to make them stand out.

However, nighttime usability is certainly not the only reason for dark mode utilization. Dark mode use is easier on the eyes in terms of strain.

With people spending an increasing amount of time in front of screens and the well-known effects of blue light on health, eye-sight, and sleep, it makes dark modes more useful in mitigating those effects.

Also, You Can Read How to Create Easy Notification Bars for Your Website

Other Benefits Of Dark Mode

Using dark background to promote lighter color display on sites is just one beneficial aspect of dark mode. Relief of eye strain and limiting blue light emission on a user’s eyes is another. Some other benefits of dark mode use include:

• Improved focus
• Enhanced concentration
• Better contrast

If a site anticipates that viewers will use it for extended periods continuously, leveraging dark mode will help relieve the strain on the eyes, a reason why dark themes are popularly used in financial apps and code editors.

Check Out the Quick Video Review On Practices With Dark UI In Web Design

Source: Flux

Conclusion

Dark mode isn’t anything new. Some sites started to use manual dark themes many years ago by simply adding a tiny control switch to one of the top corners on a page. But this year, big native apps for both desktop and mobile platforms have already started adopting an additional dark theme (or, depending on the default theme, it could be a light one) after all the major platforms have added a dark mode.

Simultaneously, dark themes also fit in perfectly with other major web design trends that involve moody and dark color patterns with glowing neon colors and various futuristic styles.

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