Life as a Digital Nomad: 10 Designers Share Their Tools

 Becoming a digital nomad when you’re already a graphic designer isn’t the easiest thing in the world. While this career path is rewarding due to the sheer freedom—and the traveling is a great bonus—there are numerous challenges you have to master to make the most of becoming a digital nomad. This kind of lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but, for those who have the passion for it, numerous benefits and overall empowerment await.

What makes this lifestyle possible is the use of the right tools, which makes all the difference to productivity and delivering fantastic results for your clients. Thanks to the interconnectivity of the web, digital nomads have the same advantages as their counterparts who are based in one location. In other words, distance and remoteness are no longer barriers to delivering high-quality work while living the transient life you want. It comes down to how you empower yourself with the right platforms.

We asked 10 Creative Market shop owners, who are also remote workers, what their go-to tools are. Here’s what they revealed.

1. Optimize Your Processes

Being a digital nomad means having to juggle many things at the same time to get projects done in a high-quality process for valued clients. When you’re traveling, there’s nothing like the security of being able to consistently depend on a wide assortment of tools—essentially, having an overall system in place—that ensures great results.

In Tomas Laurinavicius’ case, his tools of choice support everything he does from the standpoint of an entrepreneur running a business on the go. They all help him save a lot of time and effort, and each one has its own, specific job.

Here’s Tomas’ list:

  • Whereby for quick 1-on-1 video calls
  • Todoist for managing personal tasks
  • Airtable for side project databases and project management
  • Webflow for quick online prototyping and blogging
  • Spark for fast email processing on Mac
  • 1Password for password management and secure sharing
  • Google Drive for sharing documents and collaborating asynchronously
  • Figma for collaborating on visual design projects and exploring ideas
  • Slack for automated notifications, internal messaging, and connecting with cool people in niche communities
  • Bannerbear for automatically generating images for social media
  • Fathom Analytics for privacy-respecting website analytics
  • Roam Research for note-taking, writing, and knowledge management
  • MailerLite for automated email campaigns
  • Grammarly for fixing my spelling and grammar
  • Pipedrive for managing my sales process and outreach campaigns
  • Hunter for quickly finding emails
  • Toggl for tracking time
  • Calendly for scheduling calls across different time zones
  • Zapier for connecting different apps and services
  • Integromat for more advanced and granular automation of tasks
  • TextExpander for quickly typing frequently used terms and sentences
  • Makerpad for learning new skills for work and side projects
  • Wave Apps for accounting
  • Revolut for spending and stock picking
  • Stripe for online payments
  • PayPal for online payments
  • YNAB for budgeting and net worth tracking

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