The Vox Media designer’s toolkit

We have around 40 designers here at Vox Media. We don’t mandate a set workflow or standard set of tools for our designers, and so what we use varies across and even within our teams.

So, the title of this post is a bit of a misnomer—our toolkits change quickly and often. We tailor our approach to the project, and incorporate or omit tools as we see fit. We’re early adopters and love trying new products, but we still rely on tried-and-true methods (never discount a good whiteboard).

For fun, we polled our design team asking which tools they use in most, if not all, projects.

Note: We omitted some of the most common tools including Slack, GitHub, Google Drive and Google Hangouts, Trello, and Zoom, which are used pretty much universally across our product teams. Results are based on designers who responded to our internal survey distributed via Slack in September 2016.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the tools we use throughout the various stages of our process:

Other tools we use on an as-needed basis: Zeplin (for communicating specs), Typeform (for sending surveys), and PowWow (for scheduling interviews).

Iterating on our toolkit

We’re always looking for new tools to add to our product arsenal. Share your favorites with us @ssktanaka, @kelsa_, @voxproduct, and @voxstorytelling!