The pandemic has turned offline discussions and work attires into Zoom calls and working in pajamas. But for creative teams, it’s been a big ask to shift from those in-office brainstorming sessions using the old is gold approach of whiteboard and marker to the online medium. The beauty of this situation is that many designing teams tried out different tools in this period. At Ruttl, we did the same. Here are 7 tools that we think every remote creative team should definitely try out.
1. Notion
As a design team, you may have a lot of notes and resources scattered over notebooks, Slack, Trello, or even emails. When you need to find that one video about designing an element, you waste away hours on thinking, “Where would it be? Trello, Asana, or in a million other places?” At Ruttl, we decided to streamline all such data and resources in Notion. You can manage all your clients, resources, checklists, and roadmaps to designing in Notion.
What can you do with Notion?
- Have all your design resources in one place
- Track the status of each client and have a roadmap in place
- Build user personas and share them with your team
- Create site map
- Set status and filters for different elements
- Make use of calendar to track things and design stages
- Have a Kanban board to keep track of milestones
- Store images for your creatives
You can even consider effective project management with Notion by using these templates.
2. ruttl
Do you spend more time making changes to your web design than actually creating one? Ruttl is that super tool that can help you lessen your review time and help complete projects faster. You can leave live comments on websites for your team and mention the precise measurements for alignment, pixels, and spacing.
Not only that, you can involve your clients in the website feedback process by just sending a shareability link with them. They can then write or leave a video comment, without having to face the hassles of signing up and logging in every time.
What can you do with Ruttl?
- Share feedback with your team through real-time comments
- Pin comments on live pixels and give specific creative direction
- Suggest accurate values for iterations
- Make changes on live websites
- Invite clients to share their feedback
- Upload multiple versions of images
- Replace images on live websites
- Inspect CSS for your website
- Collaborate with your team
- Quickly switch between desktop and mobile view
- Revisit the previous website versions by recording them
- Keep a track of all ongoing design activities
3. ProofHub
ProofHub is a complete project management and collaboration tool that helps teams collaborate, communicate and deliver projects on time. It has all the tools needed to manage tasks, delegate tasks, track time, chat with team members, etc. It is available as both an online and a mobile app, which means you can use it from any device that you have access to. Whether you are a freelancer working from home or a large corporation with an international workforce, ProofHub can help you achieve your goals.
__What can you do with ProofHub? __
- Visualize your tasks in a table view that is easy to understand.
- Plan your tasks with Kanban boards in an intuitive manner
- See how the tasks are progressing in a timeline with Gantt charts - right on your screen!
- Create custom workflows and assign roles to different users
- Check and review content before it goes live for the best quality assurance
- Share files, chat, and discuss tasks with teammates in real-time.
- Multi-language support for global teams.
4. Loom
Loom, a video messaging tool, allows you to showcase your design by recording your screen or camera. At Ruttl, we make use of the different features of Loom like drawing tools and responding to videos in our brainstorming sessions and while sharing our creative ideas with the team. It has also helped us have better team alignment by making use of video messages to walk through complex issues and answer them in an effective way so the recipient knows what he/she has to work on.
What can you do with Loom?
- Give brief tutorials on new features or processes
- Onboard new team members by sharing a folder of Loom video messages
- Have regular progress updates
- Record loom to illustrate any bugs, technical issues, visual design, or user experience
- Share design tricks
- Give design feedback
5. Google Meet
Google Meet is a free tool that you can use for having meetings with your creative team. It comes with many features like screen sharing, adjustable layouts, calendar syncing, conference room booking, and so on. This is where your creative team can discuss ideas, the road ahead for projects, and dealing with any issues that pop up in a project.
What can you do with Google Meet?
- Host secure video meetings
- Host collaborative brainstorming sessions with digital whiteboard integration
- Have polls
- Join your meetings from your inbox
6. Brutask
Every person on a creative team is swamped up with multiple work responsibilities. A person may be working on content ideas for websites, social media posts, and case studies. Another might be working on designing the theme of a website and the company’s social media profile.
Brutask became our go-to task management tool when our entire team was getting used to WFH. Its simplicity when it comes to task management made using this tool a breeze for everyone in our creative team.
What can you do with Brutask?
- Add your daily tasks
- Prioritize your most important tasks for the day
- Allocate time for each task
- Add members and supervise your team
- Access Google meeting links directly from within the app
- Preschedule task in the future
- Build a habit of maintaining to-do lists in simple manner
7. FlowMapp
FlowMapp is an exceptional UX tool that allows you to design beautiful apps, websites and products. You can plan user journeys, create user personas, create interactive and visual sitemaps and a lot more with FlowMapp. The best part is collaboration becomes easy with FlowMapp by sharing your boards with your client as well as colleagues.
What can you do with FlowMapp?
- Site mapping
- Flowcharting
- Customer journey maps
- Persona building
8. Figma
Figma is a cloud-based tool that is specially made for creative teams to brainstorm, design, build and collaborate effectively. It works on any platform and is the only design tool of its type to even work on hardware running on different operating systems where everyone can access, edit, and share Figma files. Figma also brings to you an online whiteboard that can bring you back to your in-office days and help you conceptualize and design your creatives.
What can you do with Figma?
- Brainstorm on an online whiteboard
- Carry out ideation and execution of your design with the modern pen tool and instant arc designs
- Build an iterative design flow with live collaboration
- Automate and augment your work with various plugins
- Access various design libraries
- Inspect design files
- Make interactive prototypes with smart animation and dynamic overlays
Now that you know of these super amazing tools, try them out with your team and improve your designing process.
For more such tips on designing, UI and UX, keep track of: ruttl blog
