How To Design Better & Faster

Before diving head-first into pixels and grid dimensions, sketching out your thoughts can be a helpful first draft to organize your ideas and experiment a little.

An organized grid system lets designers precisely measure out alignments, white space, and content hierarchy to the pixel. While horizontal grids are the most used, a vertical grid (baseline) can still be useful, especially with typography. 

Using text styles and layer styles makes your design more consistent, and believe it or not, you'll end up working faster! 

Stylesheets are hugely important in CSS because they allow you to centrally manage how things visually appear across a website. Make a change the button style and every button across the whole site will update.

Consistency is one of the design principles that users naturally expect to be followed in a design. By making your design look and behave consistently you make it more understandable, more learnable and thus more usable. 

Raster graphics display images with a fixed set of pixels, whereas vectors alter the amount of pixels based on resolution and screen size —they can be scaled without loss of quality. Whenever possible, use vector graphics. 

Plug-ins are the much needed catalysts that take care of a lot of functions during the process of design ensuring you don't have to deal with tiny trivial stuff such as organising your work or collaborating with others or simply adding delightful elements in your work.