This article will showcase tools which should and could be used by designers daily. If you need some inspiration – you can visit the most popular and recommended design showcase sites to find really good works and examples. Check out design related tools, online generators, free font sites, template sites, great websites helping to test and manage websites – those all have been created to save your time! Remember – not always the best way is to create everything by yourself. Be smart and you will accomplish your tasks much easier and quicker without struggling!
I strongly suggest you to go through this article and bookmark tools, which could help you or just bookmark this page and come back whenever you feel discouraged or struggled! Enjoy!
Inspiration
Deviantart is one of the largest artist showcases on internet. You can find some great inspiration here.
Web Design Library is an internationally refereed resource that provides a platform for the dissemination of design thinking and research. It covers all theoretical and practice-oriented aspects of the effective, efficient and attractive presentation of information on-line.
Stylevault.net is a design showcase where web designers can show off their talents and get inspiration as well as giving it.
Behance is a very great place for inspiration, because there are more professionals with stunning designs.
The Design Inspiration is created by a group of designers who are seeking various design inspiration every day.
Design tools
COLOURlovers is an international community of designers and artists of all kinds who visit the site to get color inspiration, ideas and feedback for both their professional and personal projects. COLOURlovers’ loyal members create colors, palettes and patterns to nurture their ongoing love affair with color.
Adobe kuler is a web-based application by Adobe that helps you create and share color themes.
Color Hunter is a place to find and make color palettes created from images.
With ColoRotate, you can work with colors in 3D, in real time, and in a way that matches how our minds process color.
Stripemania is a simple and free web 2.0 tool to create seamless diagonal stripes for your designs. You are able to choose the size of the stripes and the spacing between those. You can even add color gradient effect for all of your stripes.
FontStruct lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.
A great website which allows you to browse fonts alphabetically, by themes, or by date. Most of the fonts are free to download.
Icon search engine with over 100 000 free icons.
Seen a font in use and want to know what it is?
Submit an image to WhatTheFont to find the closest matches in our database. Or, let cloak-draped font enthusiasts lend a hand in the WhatTheFont Forum
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Coding tools
The Typetester is an online application for comparison of different typefaces. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier.
With typeface.js you can embed custom fonts in your web pages so you don’t have to render text to images.
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScriptlive in any web page.
Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality
HTML form creator.
Zend Studio 7.0 is the next generation of our professional-grade PHP application development environment. It has been designed to maximize developer productivity by enabling you to develop and maintain code faster, solve application problems quickly and improve team collaboration.
FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.
ExpanDrive acts just like a USB drive plugged into your Mac or PC. It lets you open, edit, and save files on remote computers from within your favorite programs. ExpanDrive enhances every single application on your computer by transparently connecting it to remote data.
The W3C validator is a free service by W3C that helps check the validity of Web documents. Also available CSS validator.
jQuery UI is an open source library of interface components — interactions, full-featured widgets, and animation effects — based on the stellar jQuery javascript library . Each component is built according to jQuery’s event-driven architecture (find something, manipulate it) and is themeable, making it easy for developers of any skill level to integrate and extend into their own code.
Clean is an open source engine for AJAX, that provides a high level interface to work with the AJAX technology.
Reflection.js allows you to add reflections to images on your web pages. It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep your code clean.
Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.
CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise.
This page contains the 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, as outlined in section 24 of the official HTML 4 specifications, published by the W3C.
Pingdom offers cost-effective and reliable server, network and website monitoring. We use a global network of servers to monitor our customers’ sites 24/7, all year long. The service includes statistics for uptime and response time, and can send out alerts via SMS and email.
Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.
Free flash page builder.
BestFreeTemplates.info offers exclusive CSS templates of various categories, available for free downloading. Our free templates can be easily called one of the best free templates in the Internet. Qualitative CSS layout, absolutely unique professional web design – all this being an incontestable advantage of our free webtemplates. That’s what allows us to characterize our website templates as the best free templates.
Testing and managing site
BrowserShots is a web-based browser compatibility check tool that lets you easily preview how your website looks in all popular browsers. No email or registration required, submit your web URL and wait 3-5 min for BrowserShots to generate screenshots for each browser.
See your web design on any browser on any operating system. Check javascripts, DHTML, forms and other dynamic functionality on any platform. Not just yours. Use our bank of testing machines remotely to test your website.
Are my sites up is a simple service that notifies you when your sites goes down.
Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.
W3Counter is your free, hosted website analytics solution for answering the key questions about your website: who’s your audience, how they find your site, and what interests them.
Track and monitor the activities of your website. Knowing what your web page statistics are is the key to running a successful online business.
You could easily spend hours optimizing your pages for every browser from the first iteration of Mozilla forward. At some point you have to ask yourself, who is using this?
In the immortal words of Oscar Wilde, “The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
HUE Designer 