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20 Time-Saving Tips to Improve Designer’s Workflow

By Michael Shelton, May 26th, 2009 in How-To | 81 Comments

Want to save some time? Of course you do! You are probably always looking for ways to do this faster and make that easier, it's human nature! One of the best ways to save time is experience. The more experience you have, the more comfortable you are working, the more you have developed your own best methods, and with experience you know how to better avoid mistakes and disasters. So always stay hard at what you do and you will definitely save more than "just" time!

However, regardless of your experience level, there are ways to speed up the common design tasks. You should find some of these not-so-well-known tips and strategies listed below very helpful for your workflow. And please feel free to suggest more ideas in the comments to this post!

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15 Useful Project Management Tools

By Cameron Chapman, November 13th, 2008 in Developer's Toolbox | 245 Comments

There is a huge variety of project management applications out there. Most are general purpose apps, not aimed at any one industry. But there are a growing number of project management apps aimed specifically at one industry or another. Applications geared toward creative types are becoming more readily available, and some of the offerings are really quite good.

Many of these project management apps have built in code repositories and subversion browsers (or are built around them). A few have built in bug and issue tracking. Others include more than just basic project management. All of them can help you keep track of activities and team members. There are both free and paid options. Some have very slick interfaces, and some are modeled more after desktop applications. All are relatively easy to use and easy to set up.

Below are 15 useful project management applications, almost all of which are targeted directly at web developers, designers (both web and graphic) and other creative types. The last one is not geared specifically at creative types, but is the most unique project management application I've found, and was included on that basis as well as its potential usefulness for designers and developers.

Also consider our previous articles:
- Web Applications: Improve Your Workflow
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8 Strategies For Successful Relations With Clients

By Smashing Editorial, October 9th, 2008 in How-To | 93 Comments

Let’s face it. Some days, you want to just fire your clients. You go through one too many comps, iterations or edits and you’ve had enough. It has happened to everyone at least once and I’d be lying if I said it won’t happen again; you get to the end of a project and realize that you would have made more per hour flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

Thankfully, as with most common problems, there are a few simple guidelines that you can follow to help make sure that you’re never working for below minimum wage.

Remember that the client will always know more about their product or service than you do. They are the expert at what they do; their problem is usually that they don’t know how to explain it well. That is where you, as the designer, step in to help. You are a graphical communications ninja, but to effectively make your, and ultimately your client’s, point you must fully understand what needs to be said.

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Designing Websites In ~~Photoshop~~ Illustrator?

By Smashing Editorial, August 14th, 2008 in Events | 192 Comments

So you have done some initial sketches for the look of your new design. Now it's time to develop these ideas. So let's jump into Photoshop. Stop! Wait just a minute. What about Illustrator? That can do web-design stuff too, can’t it?

For the “its time to develop these sketches”-stage of designing a site it's worth giving Illustrator a try. You’d be surprised. Sure you can create precise finished results in Photoshop; yet Illustrator excels at generating loads of designs quickly. Comparing designs is easy — just spread them out all over your canvas. It's faster to move things around. It's easier to resize things. It's not that Illustrator is better. It's just different.

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How To Communicate Design Decisions To Clients?

By Smashing Editorial, July 22nd, 2008 in How-To | 124 Comments

You may have noticed that in certain business and marketing circles there exists a "backlash" against the design community. Despite the rise of attractive, user-friendly solutions, in such cirlces unattractive designs have somehow managed to remain at the verge of acceptance. You'll hear ideas being thrown around like "design is a waste of time — we have a really ugly site which outsells our competitors 3 to 1" or "we are not worried about the design, we'll outsource it or use a free Wordpress theme, let us focus more on the product".

You can almost sense a little bit of pride in how ugly their web-site is, or that they are treating design like a commodity. However off base these types of thoughts might be, there is clearly a lack of respect for designers in the business community at times. I'd like to address how you can shatter this barrier and talk to business folk in a language they understand.

This article provides you with 5 guidelines you can use as a designer to "speak business" — even if it's just to get your foot in the door or land a big project.

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CSS Frameworks + CSS Reset: Design From Scratch

By Smashing Editorial, September 21st, 2007 in CSS | 165 Comments

You don't have to write the same CSS-code or (X)HTML-Markup over and over again. Whatever project you're starting to work with, at some point you have to define classes and IDs you've already defined in your previous web-projects. To avoid unnecessary mistakes you might want to start not from a blank file, but from an almost "perfect" scratch. The latter might contain some basic definitions you'd write in your code anyway. However, once you've decided to create such a scratch, you need to make sure it is really bulletproof — besides, if the stylesheet also sets up optimal typographic rules and basic form styling you manage to kill two birds with one stone. And this is where CSS Frameworks and CSS Reset are becoming important. Using them, you can get yourself a perfect default-stylesheet and markup, save your time and ensure the best quality of your code from the very beginning. But what are CSS Frameworks? And why do you need the Reset for? Let's take a look at the idea behind CSS Frameworks, their advantages and disadvantages, most popular CSS frameworks and dozens of default-stylesheets you can use designing a new web-site from scratch.

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170+ Expert Ideas From World’s Leading Developers

By Smashing Editorial, September 7th, 2007 in How-To | 66 Comments

Few days ago we've published the first part of our survey "50 Designers x 6 Questions". We've presented the first three questions which we've asked and 175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas from some of the renowned web-developers all around the world we've received. Today we'd like to present you the second part of the article, which covers the rest of the survey and also presents an overview of the most important ideas and suggestions you should be aware of if you'd like to become or remain a professional.
Three More Questions
- What is one thing to do before starting a new project?
- What is one common mistake you should always avoid developing web-sites?
- What is one device/tool or/and service you can't imagine your life without?
Even More Expert Ideas!
You can find even more expert ideas, solutions and tips in our articles
- 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding Over 70 expert tips, which can improve your efficiency of CSS coding.
- 35 Designers x 5 Questions 175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas from some of the best web-developers all around the world.
You can also win one of 40+ books for professional design and development as well as one of 53 presents. First a brief summary of all 300+ suggestions, ideas and tips we've received from the world's leading web developers and experts out there. Under the summary you'll find a detailed review of all answers we've received.
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Web Applications: Improve Your Workflow

By Mark Bloomfield, August 22nd, 2007 in Developer's Toolbox | 56 Comments

by Mark Bloomfield In a world where applications are taking themselves online, there's a host of amazing web applications that perform all types of services and cater for just about any industry. Thanks to the joys of technologies like AJAX, Rails, PHP, XML powered Flash and the like, there's no limit to the functionality that can be packed into an online web application. In the coming weeks, we are going to be highlighting a number of these web applications. This week, it's all about the workflow - tools that make running your business even easier. Granted, there are probably hundreds of applications that can help you with various aspects of your business. But for now, we're going to look at project management and invoicing.
Whilst there's loads of project management tools available on the web, there's only a handful that are actually worth being called management tools. Even fewer are actually useful and worth signing up for.
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70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

By Smashing Editorial, May 10th, 2007 in CSS | 421 Comments

CSS isn't always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren't sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements. An easy way to minimize the complexity of the code is as useful as not-so-well-known CSS attributes and properties you can use to create a semantically correct markup. We've taken a close look at some of the most interesting and useful CSS tricks, tips, ideas, methods, techniques and coding solutions and listed them below. We also included some basic techniques you can probably use in every project you are developing, but which are hard to find once you need them. And what has come out of it is an overview of over 70 expert tips, which can improve your efficiency of CSS coding. You might be willing to check out the list of references and related articles in the end of this post.
- We are going to publish the .pdf-version of this post soon, so subscribe to our RSS-feed to keep track on our next posts.
- You might be interested in visiting our article 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn't Live Without, which should give you a basic toolbox for CSS-based techniques you might use in your next projects.
- Digg this article if you think it's useful.
We'd like to express sincere thank to all designers who shared their ideas, techniques, methods, knowledge and experience with their readers. Thank you, we, coders, designers, developers, information architects - you name it - really appreciate it.
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35 Designers x 5 Questions

By Smashing Editorial, April 20th, 2007 in How-To | 314 Comments

35 designers. 5 questions. 5 precise answers. Result: 175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas from some of the best web-developers all around the world. In March we've selected over 35 prominent designers and design companies, contacted them and asked to answer five design-related questions, sharing their knowledge and experience with fellows developers. Here on Smashing Magazine.

Five Questions

We've asked five questions. One single text line would have sufficed.
- 1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to.
- 1 most useful CSS-technique you use very often.
- 1 font you use in your projects very often.
- 1 design-related book you highly recommend to read.
- 1 design magazine you read on a daily/weekly basis (online or offline).
In the end we've received more answers than we expected. The results - over 80 CSS-based tips, design ideas, suggestions, fonts, design-related books and online-magazines - are listed below. It's interesting to know, how designers work their magic. It's interesting to know what you can actually learn from them.

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