Web designing is a broad field and requires focusing on several key aspects, including interface design, prototyping, animation, and so on. However, most (if not all) of the web designers fail to pay due attention to all of the important designing aspects, due to lack of time. Thankfully, there are many useful tools available online that help save web designers from working on lowly and repetitive design tasks that demands significant amount of time.
Below is a list of 15 tools that can help simplify the workflow of web designers:
If you want to create a user interface inspired by Google’s “Material Design” visual language combined with several design elements like animation, typography patterns, images and more, then Material-UI is the right tool for you. It is a CSS Framework that helps in implementing Google’s Material Design.
WYSIWYG (a.k.a What You See Is What You Get) editors is an excellent way to manipulate your document components without having to write source code manually. If you’re searching for such an editor, then Google web designer tool is worth considering. This tool helps in creating engaging and highly-interactive HTML5 based designs that can run across all the devices.
If you want to present your designs to clients in the form of interactive prototypes, rather than just static images, then Invision is exactly what you need. It is a prototyping tool that add designs to hotspots and turn static screens to clickable prototypes containing animations, gestures, etc. Additionally, it provides collaboration and real-time design presentation capabilities.
FontStruct is an ideal font-building tool for designers, who love experimenting with shape of their font types. The tool allows to create new Type fonts easily and quickly – that can be used on either a MAC or a Windows application. It allows to build fonts in the form of geometric shapes such as grid patterns.
In case you’re looking for an easy way to build beautiful APIs, then Apiary.io perfectly suit your needs. The tool enables to write an API in just 30 minutes and allows sharing it with your team members or customers. Apiary comes bundled with code samples, documentation and tools to quickly design, document and test APIs.
Creating a responsive design has become an integral part of any web design project. In fact, many websites now features a responsive layout, making them accessible on a variety of devices. But, what if you would like to make your emails responsive? You can achieve such need, by using the Ink tool – that gives the ability to create responsive HTML emails that are compatible to all the devices.
Adobe Photoshop is one of the most widely used photo editing tools that many designers recommend to use. However, not all the designers are able to utilize the Photoshop which is the best photo-editing software because of the inability to pay the software’s monthly licensing fee. If you’re also tied to a limited budget and looking for an alternative to the Photoshop software, then Pixlr is worth a try.
Even though, access to the Internet has become faster than ever before, one problem that designers still face is with optimizing their images. Since images are the lifeline of a website and helps boost interactivity, you’ll certainly want to load images in your website. But adding too many images can increase the load time of your site. Fortunately, there is a great web-based tool that helps optimize images, called as Smush.it. This tool compress images as a single zip file, saving a lot of bytes, and thereby makes the image downloading process quick.
If you’re involved in a project that requires you to build visually sophisticated infographics, then Easel.ly can help meet your needs in the best possible manner. It is an online authoring tool that makes data visualization a hassle-free task. The tool offers several amazing templates that gives you the wherewithal to create infographics in no time.
Adding CTAs (Call to actions) have become a best practice, as they help in improving UX (user experience) by giving users the path to help them meet your needs. But, remember that your CTAs must be capable enough to convince a user to take the desired action. And so, it becomes imperative to apply effects to your call to action elements. Progress Button Styles tool helps in making loading bars highly interactive, by allowing users to apply an effect out of a set of fourteen ready-made styles.
If you want to hone your designing skills and knowledge, then you can refer to the Skillshare website. This site is, basically, a learning community for creatives. It offers online classes on several topics, including multiple design disciplines. What’s more? You can even share your design work with the community of designers on Skillshare.
Are you worried whether your design will be acknowledged by your target audience or not? Almost every designer has such a concern regarding their web designs. Wouldn’t it be better if you could get a feedback regarding your design? This can be achieved with the help of Five Second Test tool. Simply upload your design mockup in the form of a screenshot and create a series of questions you want to be answered, and testers will check your screenshot and answer all the questions you’ve set in five minutes.
Colors help evoke emotions among a viewer, and plays a crucial role in providing a good user experience. However, it is very important for you to use the right color scheme on your website. You can take color inspiration and know about color trends for your web design from COLOURlovers website. It is a popular creative community wherein people from across the world share their ideas on color palletes and patters. Besides this, they even discuss about the latest color trends.
Typography can make a huge difference in the success or failure of your web design. But, creating a design with rich typographic capabilities isn’t an easy task, as you’ll need to experiment with typefaces, colors and other elements that helps in creating a good typographic design. This can be a time consuming task, if you’ll have to test each of your design for typography individually. This is where the TypeTester tool comes in handy. It helps in making the right choice in your typography. It lets you edit text in three text fields located at the top of the page, thereby making it easy for you to make an informed decision about choosing the best typographic design.
Vector Magic easily converts bitmap images to vector art. Using this tool, you can convert JPEGs, PNGs and GIFs images to clean vector graphics.
Conclusion
Here’s hoping that the tools that we’ve covered in this post will help make your creative juices flowing.
