Our top 10 apps and websites to run our design agency

Running our graphic design agency in Bristol, although fun and exciting is not an easy task! We’ve built up a pretty solid foundation of websites and apps that we use regularly to help the smooth running of our agency and thought we would share our top 10 to help any of you aspiring designers out there looking for a bit of help or a heads-up of what’s out there to help.

1) Dribbble

www.dribbble.com is an invite only online design community that we use regularly as a source of inspiration and as a sub-portfolio of our design work to share with other designers out there. It’s a great place to network with other designers both locally in Bristol, nationally and worldwide! Being invite only means in general that the quality of work users submit is high quality, however growing as rapidly as it has done though means you do sometimes get a few amateur graphic designers on the site but you quickly learn the best way to explore and discover helpful inspiration for any design project.

2) Slack

A new addition to our design studio that some other graphic designers in Bristol had recommend we use in our agency and we were hesitant at first to try yet another app that promised to help our work flow and project management but we’re happy we did! After 2 hours of each of our team members having slack setup we were hooked. Its basically a super powerful, well designed, really helpful instant messaging app that features attachments, a clean UI and all chats are organised into channels - which we use for single projects. One of the main benefits of having an app like slack setup, is the improved focus of each team member and the distraction free environment it has created.

3) Trello

There are so many to-do, list and project management apps out there and we’ve tried a hell of a lot of them to help the smooth running of our design agency. We use to use wanderlist a lot in the past for its simple note style to-do lists but we quickly out grew its simplicity and needed something with a few more features to help with some of our more complex projects we had on. Trello with its card style visual layout is awesome for project management and has managing incoming briefs much easier for everyone at the agency.

4) Freeagent

We’ve tried a few different accounting apps in the past, previously we were on invoice machine and to be fair it did its job at the time. When we had mostly small projects on and not too many outgoings its simple invoking system was working fine. But as we grew, went limited and took on staff members we needed to get better organised with all month related!! Free agent.. is nearly perfect for us at the moment. With features like live syncing with all our banks accounts, auto tax reporting and personal expenses built into the software its been a great help.  

5) Typekit

When building websites for our clients, we always use typekit to sync and host typefaces into the site. Typekit is basically a library of loads of various typefaces in multiple styles that you can embed into your websites to make them stand out and look closer to a print project than your basic website. With various accounts yes available and the ability to sync typefaces to your desktop swell as to web - Typeset is everything you need to expand your typeface selection.

6) Typeform

We often have the need to get questionnaires or surveys fill out by our clients and we used to create our own documents to send to clients and contacts, but filling them out was time consuming as people would have to copy the text into their own doc and reply. With typeform, you can setup a free account, create a questionnaire and have it all filled out online in a smooth web app that saves you and your client time in the process. We love its simplicity and customisation features to self brand and enhance the forms

7) Gmail

We’ve been using gmail since we first setup our design studio around 5 years ago and havn’t looked back. The free service with masses of storage for all your emails is fantastic not to mention all the free apps that come with the product like google drive for file sharing which we use in our studio everyday. A few team members here at our agency have tried various other email clients over the years and all agree google is the best in terms of user simplicity, UI and support for users. 

8) Spotify

What studio would be complete without a Spotify account. Everyone at our design agency uses it and loves the incredible amount of music you can stream anytime and anywhere. Spotify offer a free account which still gives you access to unlimited music but does have slightly annoying ads that pop whilst listening. We all have pro accounts which are only ￡9.99 a month and couldn’t be happier paying for the service. Other great benefits are spotifys; discover weekly which is great for finding new music and seems to understand and learn what you’ll like.

9) Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a mailshot and newsletter web app that enables you to create beautiful looking newsletter campaigns quickly and easily without having any coding or design  skills. Obviously if you do have design skills you can enhance your layouts with custom graphics that work seamlesly into their multiple templates available. We use Mailchimp for all our customer newsletters and use it to manage and organise our database of clients and customers we have built up over the years.

10) Google analytics

Having multiple websites we have built for our clients over the years and our own website on the world wide web we need to manage and assess site traffic to understand which pages are getting site traffic and what improvements we need to make to keep our sites running smoothly. Google analytics is exactly what we need and the fact it is completely free helps us too!! Its easy to setup and embed into your website and offers huge amounts of stats for everything you need to know. It can be a little tricky at first to get your head round, but there is plenty of help and quick guise to get your started. 

We hope the above information helps you guys manage your design projects and look after your clients more effectively. If you have any questions about any of the above or need a hand with understanding how to get your head round any of the apps shoot us an email at [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help you out.