A Designers Toolbox

I keep getting questions about what tools do designers actually need to churn out amazing visuals and create stunning experiences? So I put a (small) list together for what is a bare minimum designers in the Telenor system must have access to.

Fredrik Scheide

Published in

Telenor Design

2 min readAug 2, 2018

Hardware, The Right Tool for the Job

9 out of 10 designers have Mac as their main tool. Not making Apple Mac available for designers is in my opinion like taking Powerpoint away from our business people, or Excel away from our finance people. So much designer software is MAC only. But if for some (unfathomable) reason Mac is not an option. Then make sure you have access to high-end and very powerful PCs and the right software.

Save Your hands

I’ve been doing UI design for the last 25 odd years, and without my trusted Wacom tablet — I wouldn’t have been able to. Not only does it speed up the actual work, it also saves you from getting that feared “mouse-wrist”.

And Your Eyes

My eyes haven’t exactly loved staring 12–14 hours a day on a computer screen, so a good sized monitor is vital. And the monitor must support hardware colour calibration.

UI Design Software

In Short, Sketch for Mac Users and Adobe XD for PC users. Sketch is the industry standard design tool, and also the standard amongst Telenor Designers. The majority of digital designers world wide use Sketch, due to the fact that most design resources are made for Sketch. Adobe is catching up with their Adobe XD, but is not convincing designers just yet even though they are giving it away for free. But they are getting better and better by each iteration, though they are still technically in Beta. (PS! Photoshop is NOT a UI design tool, so don’t use it as one)

Design QA and Prototyping

In Telenor we use InVision to share designs and get feedback + doing design QA. Telenor Digital has an enterprise deal with InVision, and hopefully this should be accessible to all designers in the company shortly. On top of InVision, I recommend that you have access to a range of prototyping tools Proto.io, Framer etc.)

That’s it — that is the bare minimum.