There are projects in queue to be completed, team whose work to be managed and clients whose demand are to be met. All this in the limited amount of time you have, making time management and saving all the more important. Thus as a designer you not only have to make a creative design but also manage several other aspects. But there’s nothing to worry as you can use these tools and tips to easily manage such task without wasting much time and you can then focus on logo design, t shirt design or any other design speciality you work on. Following are the top 10 tools and tip for graphic designers to save time.

1. Photoshop Batch Editing- With functionality that can be an ultimate time saver for designers, it’s a must have tool for designer. The sad part though is that it’s been hardly used by designers and they end up losing their valuable time.

   Editing each image from a bunch of image using conventional method takes a long time, not to mention repetitive and boring. Using Photoshop Batch Editing tool allows one to edit many images at once if applying same edit/action on all of them. Thus, you can save a lot of time, effort and skip the repetitive work.

2. Use InDesign Style Sheet- Formatting generally takes a lot of time of a graphic designer. This valuable time can be easily saved using CSS style sheet. CSS features InDesign style sheet to do the formatting task quickly and efficiently.

   When your are using InDesign style sheet, you can easily save character styles, table styles, paragraph styles and object styles to style panels. The saved styles can be easily accessed from the saved style sheets from the style panels and apply it to any text or object for its formatting.

3. Use your Keyboard Shortcut- Deploying keyboard shortcut can prove as real time save for the daily design task. Keep in mind that you need to create your own custom shortcut rather than depending on the easily available cheat sheet of standard shortcuts. These shortcuts would make formatting your daily graphic design tasks much easier.

   You need to find out the applications or tasks you use most frequently and then create shortcuts for them. This will help you in decreasing the amount of time taken on the task you generally perform 4-5 times a day.

4. Create a common graphic/logo document- It may seem something very basic, but trust us the moment you are in need of a previously made t shirt design or business logo, it becomes very hard to find. One generally spends hours in searching for the right design and the associated files with. Thus, we would suggest you to make a folder where you put all your files divided into proper sub-folders, so that it’s easier for you to search.
5. Set up a Home Network- You do not know when a work might pop up, device you have to use, etc. So it’s necessary for you to setup a home network. Even by setting up a basic level home network, you can save a lot of valuable hours, as you can access files and programs from any of your devices.
6. Collaboration Tools- You might need to collaborate with other designers who are working with you on the same project. Sending them mail every time is a too time consuming process and is hard to take everyone on loop.
   You can use collaboration software like Slack where your entire team can update about the current progress of a task, doubts if any, etc.
7. Rate Calculator- It’s hard for a graphic designer to set up the cost of the service they give. A reason most of them often tend to charge less for the service. Thus, one needs to make a detailed research of the hourly work they put in, the cost of the software used and the profit margin they seek. Taking everything in consideration you need to prepare a file denoting all these expenses and then you can use any online rate calculator to calculate your price.
8. Proposal Generator- Suppose your customer is interested in availing a t shirt design service from you. The first thing that you need to send him is a proposal and for a designer it’s hard to create a professional business proposal. Do not worry, there are many online proposal generator tools using which one can easily create a professional looking proposals.
9. Invoicing Software- You have submitted your client the design and it has been finalised. Now comes the hard part of sending an invoice to your client to collect the money. Generating an invoice every time can be tough for a designer and as such one can use invoicing softwares that can create invoices along with the payment link.
10. Design Templates- Creating a brochure, presentation or another type of corporate design piece is hard. You need to collect information from the client, figure out how the content will be laid out in the page, and come up with a visual system to share that story.

    Pre-made design templates can come to your rescue. There are sites which offer complete graphic kits that make designing corporate branding pieces a breeze. They help save time by providing pre-designed layouts, grids, and a particular aesthetic.

These are the few tips we think can help a graphic designer save time and effort. What do you think guys? Do share your views.