Are you struggling to find the best design tool to create a user-centric mobile app design? Want to know the best design tools available in the market and tutorials to use them in the best way to design engaging UI/UX?
Don’t worry by spending a healthy amount of time and testing almost every design tool available in the market, our designers have shortlisted the 13 best design tools that can help any designer create utterly aesthetic, intuitive, and highly engaging app design.
At present, there are several mobile apps design toolkits available in the market. We have been experimenting with different inbuilt tools, plug-ins, and extensions, present in these toolkits, to help you out in making the right choice when selecting online resources for designing your own apps.
What we concluded is a list of the 13 most useful apps or tools that can suffice your entire app designing needs by letting you create aesthetic pitches, screens, and workflows with ease.
Invision
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A workflow, collaboration, and prototyping tool that has the capability to convert your static application designs into fully functional prototypes having an interactive nature.
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What is even more impressive is the fact that these prototypes carry animations, transitions, and gestures for Android, iOS, as well as responsive web apps.
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Let your clients have a firsthand experience of navigating through designs, leading to more sales when displaying to existing or prospective clients.
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With Invision, you not only test visuals, but even wireframe flows in a more tangible manner.
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Without any kind of coding, you can have designs coming to life, letting you as designers to identify issues and problems upfront, helping you to iterate accordingly.
UXPin
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It is a comprehensive tool for prototyping and wireframing.
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There are so many inbuilt interface elements and components, which let you use drag and drop integration connected with Sketch & Photoshop.
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You can even preserve your design layers simplifying the workflow.
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Provide support to your decisions related to design with the help of inbuilt usability testing that lets you generate tasks, track users, analyze user clicks, and finally display results to the team.
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Furthermore, UXPin initiates speeding up of design, testing, as well as rollout stages.
Sketch
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It is highly similar to the most popular design software Photoshop, but it is a more powerful graphic design tool.
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This tool not only provides a wide range of tools but also delivers results that look very professional.
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A few advanced features that it provides are stylized vector shapes, 2x zooming export, and infinite zooming.
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With an Export All feature present in this vector-based tool, it can export images in all three major formats – PNG, JPG, and PDF.
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Sketch combines functionalities from 3 best tools used in design: provides vector logos just like Illustrator, visual designs same as Photoshop, and wireframing similar to one seen in Omnigraffle.
Slicy
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It is a worth-looking tool capable of expediting the slicing process.
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It specializes comprehensively in exporting assets from Photoshop PSD to GIF, JPG, PNG, and other image formats.
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Such a feature helps designers who use Photoshop and are involved in creating an iOS workflow.
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Exporting assets in a visual manner becomes painless by simply dragging and dropping a Photoshop file on the Slicy window once launched with files exported automatically.
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Just tell which layers or probably groups of layers to exxport, and it is done quickly just like that.
Skala Preview
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It is a wonderful tool that displays image previews on both Android and iOS devices with accurate color as well as size presentation.
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The designers can also have a look at the canvas previews while they edit.
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By setting up a remote connection, every update is noticed and highlighted instantly.
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Getting access to real-time previews to act as a bridge between prototypes and working files.
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Skala Preview has expertise in ergonomics, contrast, text sizes, fonts, and testing colors.
PlaceIt
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It is a simple tool for drag and drop helping designers take realistic screenshots of Android, iOS, Windows apps in few seconds.
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PlaceIt is definitely worth giving a try if you want to present your work portfolio in an artistic, elegant, and enticing way.
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Bring realistic environments to life by creating aesthetically beautiful designs.
Adobe Color
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Not able to find customized color scheme for your app? Adobe Color comes to your rescue with an amazingly interactive color wheel with thousands of color combinations to choose from.
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You can save your color palettes, edit it anytime, and use in the future whenever you need.
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Check out the top rated color schemes, most popular color schemes, newest color schemes, and take your pick or probably create a new color combination altogether.
FontFace Ninja
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A free plugin to identify fonts that is not just simple to use but also provides you room to explore unexplored fonts.
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Enjoy fonts seamlessly on a blank background without worrying anymore about commercials or pictures.
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As soon as you add the plugin to the browser, drag mouse pointer on any font present on the website, and you will get line spacing, point size, and font name details immediately.
Illustrator & Photoshop
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Photoshop, the most popular software for photo editing, has been the No. 1 choice for UI/UX designers for creating high-end visuals. It is a bitmap, which is pixel-based, that provides an ideal layout for interface or experience design.
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It is not surprising to see Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator all around the place due to an array of functionalities that they provide.
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Illustrator, the most popular software for vector graphics, enables infinite resizing of elements without compromising on quality. It is the most preferred choice when it comes to creation of icons and logos due to its unrestricted manipulation edge.
Omnigraffle
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There are also options available for re-using components, and importing custom libraries, for an efficient process.
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In order to streamline the wireframing process, the tool uses exporting options that work frictionless, makes use of element/icon templates, duplicates master pages, and even uses vector graphics.
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A topmost tool for wireframing and diagrams, that helps to create extensive wireframes and multi-page decks.
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Omnigraffle tool has made it possible to reduce creation time by half literally.
Proto.io
Proto.io is a kind of platform, which lets you deliver full-fledged build interactive simulations and prototypes.
You can have touch gestures; orientation changes; and screen transitions; emulated for iPad, iPhone, Android Wear, iOS Wear, cars, alarms, refrigerators, gaming, smart TVs and other Internet based devices.
After Effects
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You can easily have prototypes for almost any kind of animation, and no limits once you have your grip on this tool.
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It is a daunting task to convey animations and transitions in between every screen. However, Adobe After Effects
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Whether any type of motion graphics or differently paced animations, this is a one-stop tool for all needs.
Fluid UI
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Turn your idea into a prototype in minutes with the Fluid UI drag and drop editor which is very easy to use.
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Gather feedback quickly from users, stakeholders and investors.
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Bring your team together with the most powerful collaboration tool for designers.
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Create prototype more quickly using over 2000 built in components. Choose from Material Design, iOS, Windows and Wireframe libraries.
Conclusion
This blog does not advocate only 13 tools that are best for mobile app design. As time passes, new technologies and new innovators with smart tools come into the market. 13 tools that we have discussed here, are personally used by our expert designers and they found it the best tool for mobile app design.
Your choice could vary but here we have tried to help you make a wise decision, save time in testing hundreds of designing tools and give you the top tools’ names so that you can master the best and grow your career. Hope this blog has helped you out in choosing the right design tool.
