There are approximately four million websites created every single day. Given this, it can be hard to navigate through the noise and find web services that can be consistently relied upon to fulfil a range of useful and helpful functions, both for industry use and in day-to-day life. We’ve put together a few of the tools we use every week from a digital marketing, design and development perspective!

Lets Enhance

Few things are more frustrating for a graphic designer than trying to develop a design for print with a collection of photos more suited to profile pictures on social media… But AI has delivered one saving grave in the form of letsenhance.io – a tool to upscale the size and resolution of photos and graphics. There are pretty big limitations on the free version of this tool – scaling up beyond 4x, sizing up to a specific width and height, and the removal of the watermark are all limited to paid plans. However, this tool has been so useful to us, particularly when designing for large scale banners! You can even remove the background while you’re at it…

Remove.BG

If you’re in a hurry to remove a background and don’t need a high-resolution result, remove.bg is your best bet. Simply drag and drop your image in and watch the magic happen. We’ve found this especially useful for headshots, and it’s our go-to tool for fast background removal.

Pairdrop

Airdrop in the Apple ecosystem is incredibly useful. Being able to switch between devices for editing text and uploading imagery on the fly saves so much time and the seamless integration that Apple provides is unrivalled – until now! Pairdrop brings a similar level of connectivity between ANY device – PC, Mac, iPhone, Android and more. No more emailing yourself that document, simply install the app on your devices (or open the website up in browser) and you can share any item of almost any size in a matter of seconds.

Descript

One of the most useful applications of AI is transcription – a tedious 45 minute job can be reduced to a few clicks on video editing software like Final Cut or Premiere Pro. Descript brings the same functionality to every day use, simply drag in a video or an audio file and the software will do the rest – exporting the words of multiple speakers into one easy-to-follow Word document or PDF.

Datawrapper

Choropleth mapping for data analysis is always helpful to understand geographic trends across different datasets. Datawrapper is a wonderful tool that lets any user map data in a number of different ways, and has preset templates for geographic regions such as US state or UK constituencies.

If you need advice and support to find the right digital tools for your organisation, contact us at info@plmr.co.uk