Best Mac Software For Web Design

Best Mac Software For Web Design Rating: 3,7/5 425 votes

Which mac is best for photographers. With the right design software, you can create almost any print or web project imaginable. For print projects, you generally need word processing, page layout and graphics applications. For the web, some of those same programs work, but there's also specialized web design software as well. Creative and personal printing programs feature clip art and templates for a variety of home, school and office projects. Discover what specific design software works best for each use.

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  2. Best Mac Software For Web Design

A crowded slate of Mac apps aim to make building a full-featured, modern website drag-and-drop simple. Many even support one of the most crucial new web trends: responsive design, which can. Vector graphic design software engineered specifically for the Mac, Affinity Designer offers lightning-fast tools that work in exactly the way you need. Real-time previews and customizable workspaces are just a few elements in this powerful design environment.

Professional Graphic Design Software

Graphic design software and desktop publishing software are closely related. These programs are geared toward producing documents for commercial printing and high-end web publishing.

Most professionals give the nod to Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress page layout software in this category. These high end—and high price—programs are essential for professional level work. PagePlus and Microsoft Publisher more reasonably priced programs with similar capabilities to the two powerhouses.

Additionally, graphics professionals require image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel PaintShop Pro, and vector drawing software, such as Serif DrawPlus or Adobe Illustrator.

Identity Design Software

Identity systems encompass logos, letterhead and business cards. They spill over into other areas such as business forms, brochures, and signage as well. There are specialized programs available for all these documents—most geared toward small businesses. Most of these materials can be easily created in almost any design software. For logo design, look specifically at illustration software that produces scaleable vector graphics, such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw

Personal Print Design Software for Mac

Almost any program, including high-end design software, can handle calendars, greeting cards, posters, newsletters, and other creative printing. However, with specialized creative print design software, you get increased ease-of-use, lots of templates for crafty projects, and fun clip art and fonts to go along with it all—without the steep learning curve or price tag necessary to run high-end software.

Personal Design Software for Windows

Although you can create scrapbooks, greeting cards, calendars, iron-on transfers, and other creative printing projects with almost any desktop publishing or graphics software, specialized creative print design software makes the process easier and faster, and usually costs less. These programs typically include templates and artwork specifically tailored to each type of project.

Web Design Software

Many of today's professional page layout programs for print have web publishing features as well, but are they the best tools for the job or do you need a program specifically for web design such as Adobe's Dreamweaver and Muse or something like CoffeeCup and KompoZer? There are versions for Mac and Windows. Dreamweaver and Muse are available as part of an Adobe CC subscription package. CoffeeCup and KompoZer are affordable downloads on their respective websites.

Free Design Software

There are many reasons to consider using free publishing software for Mac or Windows beyond just the cost-savings. Programs such as Scribus, OpenOffice and the free version of PagePlus are powerful programs, often comparable in features to some of the most expensive applications from Adobe or Microsoft.

Font Design Software

From the standard of Fontographer to up-and-coming contenders and specialty font editors for beginners and pros, font design software lets you make your own fonts. Some programs are aimed at professional type designers, while others let anyone turn their handwriting into a font, apply special effects to a basic font, convert fonts or add special characters to an existing font.

Buying and Using Design Software

In order to do your job effectively, you want to choose the best design software, but design software is often expensive. There are several ways to save money on design software. The creative printing titles generally cost a lot less than professional graphic design software. The free software is quite powerful too. You may qualify for academic pricing. Using older versions can save money and often do exactly what you need.

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Whatever approach you take to choosing your design software, to really get your money's worth you need to learn how to use it. There are training avenues suitable for all learning styles.

Mac applications have always been known for their gorgeous design and user-friendly interfaces. When compared to the hundreds of amazing iPhone apps that hit the market every single week though, it can seem like the Mac development community has gone stagnant. Fortunately, this couldn't be further from the truth. Hardworking, dedicated Mac developers are still churning out amazing applications and pushing the bounds of the platform to change the way you work. Here are 15 fresh Mac applications that designers and developers will love.

Hammer

Hammer for Mac is a veritable Swiss Army Knife of useful tools for developers. For starters, it's an effortless, GUI-driven compiler for SASS (with Bourbon), CoffeeScript, HAML & Markdown. The real power of Hammer though lies in its own custom HTML tags that provide PHP-like superpowers right in your vanilla HTML: variables, automatic file paths, image placeholders, HTML includes and more.

Cactus

Cactus is one of the best, most simple static site generators around, and it's free! It supports local development, preprocessors, S3, and more. If you think the days of amazing free Mac apps are long gone, think again.

Macaw

Macaw is one of the few WYSIWYG web design editors that I actually enjoy using. It's built from the ground up to have a responsive design workflow and is extremely powerful. If you'd like to hear more, check out our interview with one of Macaw's founders.

Blocs

Focusing on simplicity and quality, Blocs frees you from the need to write your own code. It's a lot like Macaw, but with less emphasis on powerful customization and more emphasis on rapid development with pre-built content blocks.

Affinity Designer

Vector graphic design software engineered specifically for the Mac, Affinity Designer offers lightning-fast tools that work in exactly the way you need. Real-time previews and customizable workspaces are just a few elements in this powerful design environment. Affinity is the new kid on the block in the design tool space, but its affordability and amazingly powerful feature set is quickly setting it apart as a major competitor.

Sketch

Built for the contemporary graphic artist, Sketch lets you easily create complex shapes and layers. Its flexible workflow supports multiple pages and art boards while it enables you to rapidly re-use elements as needed. Winner of the Apple Design Award and recipient of five-star reviews from DigitalArts and MacWorld, Sketch is the go-to tool for the web's top designers. You'll find countless blog posts online from designers who have given up Photoshop for web/interface design and found a welcome alternative in Sketch.

Best Mac Software For Recording Youtube Videos

Pixelmator

Best web design software for mac

Pixelmator is perhaps the best Mac Photoshop alternative around (at least for raster artwork and photo editing). If you're a Photoshop fan, the workflow and toolset will feel familiar, yet refined. It doesn't have the feature bloat that's crept into Photoshop over the last two decades and it's price point is unbeatable: $29.99. They recently released an iPad version that looks pretty sharp too.

RapidWeaver 6

RapidWeaver is the veteran on this list. It's been around for a long time and has always been what Apple's failed iWeb should've been: a fantastic way for absolutely anyone to built a website. This app might not be new, but the thing is, it keeps getting better and better, and version 6 is outstanding. With a dead-simple design workflow, gorgeous themes, and enough rich plugins to provide any feature you can dream up, RapidWeaver is a perfect example of why the Mac developer ecosystem simply can't be beat.

SketchBook

If you're a sketch artist, SketchBook isn't a luxury, it's a necessity. Built by our parent company Autodesk, SketchBook is an app that will delight true artists and newbies alike. The industry-best feature set is huge and powerful, but it avoids any distracting UI clutter so you can focus on your artwork.

Gravit

Offering the features of a full-size design suite in a compact app format, Gravit provides a set of intuitive tools in a streamlined workspace. Raster and vector effects, as well as path, shape and typography tools, are all at your fingertips for easy creation of complex designs. The best thing about Gravit is that it's a creative tool that's licensed like creative art, using creative commons.

Framer Studio & Briefs

Framer is an innovative prototyping application that helps you build interactive mockups of your apps so you can experiment with different types of interaction. You can import your Photoshop, Sketch, or AfterEffects files, then use simple CoffeeScript to create high fidelity, animated prototypes that run on mobile devices.

If Framer is a bit too complex for you, try Briefs, a simpler, code-free alternative.

Atom

Atom is a powerful text editor built by the folks at GitHub, and it's an open-source system that's 'hackable to the core.' You can access the file system, initiate original sub-processes and seamlessly integrate Node and browser APIs. I use and love Sublime Text, but Atom has me seriously thinking twice about that dedication.

Brackets

Best Mac Software For Web Design

Like GitHub, Adobe is gunning to be the standard text editor in your dock. Brackets is a lightweight open-source text editor that puts powerful visual tools in your hands. Inline editors, a live preview and pre-processor support all combine to generate clean design and flawless CSS. Where Atom and Sublime feel eerily similar, Brackets has some truly unique features that give it a personality all its own.

Avocode

Avocode is meant to be a bridge between designers and developers. It helps you take Photoshop mockups and turn them into front end code. You can really dig into a PSD and grab colors, generate code from vector shapes, and export images in a variety of formats. If you're interested, check out our comparison of Avocode and Adobe's Creative Cloud Extract.

What Did We Miss?

These 15 next-gen Mac applications make me excited about OS X again and where we're headed with the future of design and development software. If you know of any great apps that should be added to the list, leave a comment below.

Want to learn more? Check out 10 Apps to Turn Your iPad Into a Bad Ass Drawing Tablet, The Best Screenshot Apps for Mac & Windows, and 5 Great Tools To Share Design Files with Your Team.


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