Top 5 productivity tools in 2020

At the dawn of a new year, it's an important question to ask, and if you're honest with yourself, the answer will very probably be yes. Are there one or two productivity tools that can help you get the routine and boring parts of your job done more quickly, and allow you more time to spend on the creative, imaginative and fun sides?

In this post, we round up some of the best productivity tools for creatives and explain what they do, who they're aimed at, and how they can help you in your creative work. We recently found some of the best web design tools to help you work smarter in 2020.

1. Trello

Trello has been widely adopted across the graphic and web design professions, so your collaborators stand a good chance of being familiar with it already. Best of all, Trello is free for most purposes, and you’d only need to graduate to the paid-for versions for large-scale enterprise use.

Trello is basically a to-do list that you share with others and update in real-time, so everyone on your team knows what’s going on at any given moment. Based on a system of cards, which are essentially like virtual Post-it notes, the system is very flexible and easy to adapt to however your project is structured.

It lacks some of the advanced features of a fully-featured project management tool, such as time management and reporting. But that said, its beauty lies in its simplicity and we’re not sure we’d want its interface to become too overcomplicated.

2. Adobe Creative Cloud

The Adobe Creative Cloud is a subscription service providing a full suite of desktop apps, mobile apps, and services from Adobe. The best known of these are Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Photoshop Lightroom and Premiere Pro, but there are plenty more you may not have heard of, such as notably Prelude, Flash Builder and Story Plus.

While there are some decent alternatives to Photoshop and other Adobe apps these days, there’s quite simply nothing to rival the Creative Cloud ecosystem, and as the industry standard, it’s a no-brainer for most professional graphic and web designers, not to mention photographers, digital artists and illustrators, and increasingly, 3D artists and animators.

Your subscription also gets you access to typefaces via TypeKit; cloud storage for your projects; Adobe Portfolio, a tool for building your portfolio; and stock images, videos, and templates with Adobe Stock.

3. Apple Pencil

Are you struggling with an old-school stylus that suffers from a lot of lag? In short, it's the best experience we've had drawing on the IPad and the closest to using a real pencil on real paper. It looks pretty darned stylish too. Then you'll likely get a huge productivity boost by investing in a newer model, and if you're an iPad user, we'd highly recommend the Apple Pencil for its accuracy, speed, and precision.

4. Surface Pro 7

The Surface Pro 7 is a tablet that’s powerful enough to run full Windows 10 programs while remaining sleek and light. It also doubles up as a laptop with the separately sold keyboard. While this device is still no match for the performance of a powerful Windows desktop, it does offer a superbly flexible way to stay up to date on the move, for anyone who needs to run full Windows 10 tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, rather than lower-powered Android or iOS alternatives.

Using Intel’s latest 10th generation processors, the Pro 7 is a step up from previous models in terms of performance, and the more expensive model does a great job at handling graphic-intensive tasks, such as video rendering.

5. Procreate

Closely replicating the feel of physical drawing in a digital format, it supports a range of styluses, including the Apple Pencil, along with hundreds of high-quality brushes and a suite of innovative features. In short, everything you need to create sketches, paintings, illustrations, and animations while you're out and about.