Every year I tell myself I'll simplify. Every year, I don't.
But somewhere between the apps I opened once and the ones I reach for before my coffee cools, a real toolkit emerged in 2024. Here's what actually made the cut.
There's no shortage of "toolkit" posts online, most of them read like affiliate link farms dressed up as personal essays. This isn't that.
These are the tools I genuinely used to ship client work, personal projects, and the occasional passion piece that went nowhere but taught me something.
I've split them into categories that reflect how I actually think about my workflow, not how tools market themselves.
I know. Everyone uses Figma. But I'm specifically talking about FigJam as a thinking surface, not for polished wireframes, but for the chaotic middle stage where I'm mapping relationships between visual concepts, pinning reference images, and writing bad notes to myself. The infinite canvas format suits how visual thinking actually works: non-linearly, associatively, with lots of dead ends.
Placeholder this one intentionally, because the "right" note app is deeply personal. What I look for: fast capture, no friction, and the ability to link a rough sketch to a written thought. If your current app does that, keep it.
Still irreplaceable. Not for precious drawings, for ugly thumbnails, composition tests, and the kind of spatial thinking that doesn't translate to a trackpad. I went through three Leuchtturm1917 notebooks this year. No tool has come close to replacing them.
After flirting with Affinity Designer for two years, I came back to Illustrator for client work. The ecosystem integration, the type tools, and frankly the muscle memory were too valuable to abandon. I'm not evangelical about it; it's just where I'm fastest.
My most-used app of 2024, full stop. I moved a significant portion of my illustration and texture work here. The workflow of drawing on the go, then importing assets into a desktop layout, became natural quickly. The brush engine rewards experimentation in a way that feels genuinely different from desktop tools.
Mostly for compositing, retouching client photography, and the occasional bitmap-heavy editorial piece. I use it less than I used to, but when I need it, nothing else will do.
I'll leave this deliberately vague because the landscape changed so fast in 2024 that whatever I recommend here may be obsolete. What I'll say: I used AI image generation as a mood board accelerant and texture source, not as a delivery tool. It compressed the reference-gathering phase from hours to minutes.
"The best toolkit is the one you actually use, which is different from the one that sounds most impressive at a conference."
The honest takeaway, 2024Font management is unglamorous until you're 40 minutes into a project and can't find that typeface you used in 2022. A dedicated font manager keeps the library organized and activatable on demand. I activate by project, not permanently, it keeps the system clean.
I use these as provocations, not authorities. Sometimes the fastest way out of a color rut is a palette you didn't generate yourself, used as a springboard.
If you work with repeat clients or across a brand, having a living document of your decisions, color tokens, type scales, component logic, saves enormous time. Mine lives in Figma. Yours might live somewhere else. The format matters less than the discipline of maintaining it.
Client handoff, developer specs, interactive prototypes. Figma's dominance here is hard to argue with in 2024. I've made peace with it.
For projects involving motion or video, even just animated assets, having a shared review link with time-coded comments is a game-changer. It removes a full category of email thread.
Nothing exciting. But organized folder structures and a reliable sync layer are the plumbing of a functional studio. I've seen creative businesses collapse under file chaos. This is the boring infrastructure that makes everything else work.
Not every tool earns a place. Some exist to be admired. Some just didn't fit.
Useful for quick client social posts. Genuinely not the right tool for anything that requires precision or originality.
Used it for three months, went back to a single large display. Too much context-switching.
Downloaded it, was impressed, never integrated it into a real project. Some tools exist to be admired.
More experiments abandoned than admitted.
In 2024, I used fewer tools than in 2023, and the work was better for it. The reduction forced fluency. If I were advising someone building their toolkit from scratch, I'd say: master one tool at each layer before adding another.
What's in your toolkit? I'm always curious what's working for other designers.