Daily Tools I Use as a UI/UX Designer in 2026

Every year I write this list and every year it gets shorter. Not because the tools got worse, but because the work got clearer: most of what I used to keep open was there to compensate for a decision I had not made yet.

What stays open all day

Three windows, in this order of use.

• Figma for everything visual, from the first grey boxes to the handoff file.
• Webflow for the build, because the design and the production site being the same artifact removes an entire class of drift.
• Linear for what is next. It earns its place by being fast enough that I do not avoid it.

That is the whole list. Everything else opens when a specific task calls for it and closes again.

What I stopped paying for

I dropped four subscriptions this year. A whiteboarding tool I used twice. A screenshot annotator that a keyboard shortcut already covers. A “design system” service whose job my component library was already doing. And a stock library I opened once a quarter.

A tool you use quarterly is not a tool. It is a bookmark with a credit card attached.

The test I now apply before renewing anything: if this vanished tomorrow, what would break? If the honest answer is “nothing, I would just do it slightly slower once”, the answer is to let it go.

The part that is not software

The single biggest improvement to my day was not a tool. It was writing the brief before opening anything. Ten minutes of plain sentences — who this is for, what it has to do, what it must not do — and the design work stops being exploration and starts being execution.

Tools make execution faster. They cannot make exploration shorter. Only a decision does that.