“Design is the application of intent the opposite of happenstance and an antidote to accident.”
– Robert L. Peters
Stepping in to the world of design can be quite intimidating and exciting at the same time. Sometimes you’ll feel like you’re facing that “creative block” with a lack of sufficient tools, resources and skills that you need to accomplish a typical project. At other times, you’ll find your mind being stuffed with ideas which aren’t organized in any proper order.
When it comes to starting your career in web design or development, the most important thing is to create your own toolkit, which plays an essential part in achieving the desired results. Your toolkit should contain a collection of resources which can help you convert a blank page into something creative.
In this article, you’ll have a look at a list of 7 of the most incredibly useful tools and resources for web designers and developers stepping into the world of design. Whether you’re looking for a beautiful new font, readymade codes/JQueries or a design inspiration, these resources will help you become an awesome designer/developer and will let you complete your projects in no time:
- Colour Code
Colour Code is one of the most amazing tools for generating color schemes. Through this spontaneous and easy to use application, you can easily generate different color schemes for your website. All you need to do is move your mouse over the screen and this web-app will automatically generate different colors according to the categories provided on the left. The categories include free build, monochrome, analogic, complement, triad and quad colour schemes.
- Lorem Ipsum Generators
Lorem Ipsum has been use as a dummy text for the printing and typesetting industry since the 16th century. A Lorem Ipsum generator is used to create the number of words, sentences and paragraphs you want for your website. It allows you to incorporate a large amount of text in your website so that you don’t have to create it yourself. It lets you see how the text would look on your website.
- Buttons
With Buttons, you get a collection of various CSS button styles built with Sass and Compass. The styles range from flat and glow buttons to circle and block shape buttons. You can also get button sizes, wrappers and form elements here. The styles can be configured according to your requirements.
- Mmenu
Mmenu is a jQuery plugin that lets you create an unlimited number of refined, appealing sliding menus (with an unlimited number of sub-menus) for your mobile website using only a single line of javascript. This plugin has a fully responsive CSS framework generated with SCSS and creates sliding panels of menus that can be placed at the top, bottom, left or right, or at the front or back of the page.
- Dimensions
“Dimensions” is a free web design tool that is used for quickly testing responsive websites at different viewports. In other words, it can be called a ‘responsive web design testing tool.’ It even works offline and is compatible with LiveReload. Designers can use this nice Google Chrome extension. The key features include a ‘draggable’ handle to find breakpoints in your design, a Preview Mode that shows your website on various devices, and a ruler that shows the viewport size.
- .Fitgrd
.Fitgrd is a cool looking responsive grid for your website that is designed for quick prototyping. This grid system is divided into 12 columns with each column having 2% of margin on both sides. This grid gives web designers the ability to save a lot of dispensable coding.
- Fontastic
Fontastic is a great tool for creating font icons in seconds. It has more than 4200 icons available from which you can create your own personal icon collections. Click to select the icons you want to include and make your website faster. You can also customize your font or download a packaged folder containing all the fonts. The best thing about Fontastic is that it allows you to include only the icons you need, which eventually helps speed up your website.
Leave a Reply