10 Web Design Tools for Web Designers
There are many web design tools available for professionals, business owners or the novice. We’ve summarized a few that we’ve used in the past, and could be helpful to you. Helpful in the sense that such tools will help productivity when it comes to web design, graphic work, or just coding.
1. Mockingbird
Mockingbird is an excellent tool that allows web designers to create a snapshot of the website or web app. It is clean and has helpful features that are easy and simple to use. It works well on all browsers, Mac, Windows or Linux.
It's a great tool to give to clients to have them play around with the layout too! Once you’re done designing your website or web app you can then share your wireframes with others by generating a URL to send to clients.
Aligning objects in Mockingbird is simple. In fact, there are horizontal and vertical guides to show when an item is lined up.
2. Adobe Color
Adobe Color is a cloud-based application to make color themes. It's an easy way to pick inspiring color combinations. The tool helps select the colors you want or create your own color palette. There are other alternatives for picking colors in the browser. You can also output the color of the images and integrate them with the right color blocks in Adobe Illustrator.
Some other color picking tools are Color Hunter, Color Lovers, CSS Drive Color Palette Generator, image color, color picker — HTML color codes as well as Collar.
As someone who understands web design elements and enjoys designing websites, I am really interested in design and color use. One tool I find easy to use is this tool. Adobe Color also comes as a desktop version too which is very useful if you use other Adobe products like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Animate, Adobe After Effects, etc. If you don’t want to download the app then the Adobe Color website is pretty cool.
Users can manually drag the color wheel wherever they want to generate their desired colors, view other color schemes of different people, easily pick any color from an uploaded image and many more tools available for the users.
3. Photoshop
Photoshop is an excellent application and can be used in any aspect of design. As a whole, it is the perfect application for image-editing, graphic design and creating web images. For example, logos, and graphics. Graphic designers generally use Photoshop to create commercial digital content.
The tool’s actual name is Adobe Photoshop and is developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated. It works on Apple Mac and Windows operating systems.
Although there are other good alternatives such as Gimp, the truth is that Photoshop is the best with image editing. This is due to its high quality and the immense amount of tools it offers to perform image editing tasks. The software has editing layers that give the designer the ability to create images, apply different filters and textures, shadows and more.
You can design your entire business website with Photoshop and create web pages from scratch as well as customize the layout.
In the digital world and through the internet you can have access to a multitude of tutorials that help you use this program. For example, Adobe Systems Incorporated has a collection of free tutorials for Photoshop and online access.
4. Google Fonts
Typographies can make or break a website or digital content. Hence picking the right one requires research and product understanding. For example, a complete web page must have several elements that make it stand out. One of the most important one is the typography.
Google Fonts guarantees that your font will be original and suitable for the corporate image or style you imagine, while here you find a free catalog with many options.
And if you need a little inspiration, you can also visit its Featured section where you will meet many thematic collections created by the same tool.
Outstanding advantage: it is very intuitive and visual. Within its application, you will find search filters that you can determine by categories and test options to choose the one that best suits your website.
In fact, the difficulty of typography is not in choosing them, but in combining them correctly, as there are thousands of different options and sometimes can be complicated.
The tool I use most to search for fonts is Google Fonts, although there are others that I also like.
5. Cognito Forms
If you are looking for a way to get smart about designing an HTML form, Cognito forms have a friendly interaction with very strong features. It is an easy to use online form builder that allows you to quickly create powerful forms for your website. You may build any form you want including, contact forms, registration forms, option forms and so on in just a matter of minutes.
You can build forms, link to your website and collect inputs from the users too.
You can use this site to generate the code for your form. You will have the complete code, this page significantly reduces the time it takes to create an HTML form.
To get started, you’ll need to sign up for an account by providing your email address. When you sign up, the site offers you a list of payment plans you can subscribe to.
6. Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor used by web developers. It helps optimizes routines and code more effectively. In addition, it makes efficient use of your CPU’s energy, which helps you reduce your carbon dioxide emissions.
This is one of the most advanced web development tools in the market. Especially if you have enough development and coding knowledge and want to create your website specifically through hard coding.
Sublime Text is a lightweight and intuitive code editor with a variety of options and functions to further personalize your website.
7. WhatFont
Have you ever seen a typeface that caught your attention, but you never knew what it was? Many sources may be well known, but many fonts are released each day and increasingly difficult to identify.
WhatFont allows you to tell you the font used in an image or website!
This tool is the most powerful in the market thanks to its simplicity, speed and recognition capacity. How fast can it be? In less than 10 seconds it gives you an extensive list of sources similar to the one you are looking for.
8. Canva
Canva allows drag-and-drop features and layouts to design, share and print business cards, logos, presentations and much more.
Its functions are simpler compared to other web design tools, but without a doubt, just as effective. Canva is the star platform in the creation of images, headers for blogs and web pages. Considering that it is the first thing that your users will see, it has become an essential tool when it comes to harmonizing the design of any website.
In addition, it has also become an allied platform when creating publications for social networks. And the plus of this tool is that you don’t have to be an expert in graphic design, its interface is very simple, free and online.
If you are looking for a way to create graphs for using the site without spending hundreds on professional graphic design software, Canva is the perfect solution. You can create beautiful graphics using drag-and-drop format with access to millions of photographs, vectors, and fonts.
9. Mockflow
Creating wireframes has never been easier! The Mockflow tool is perfect for building design schemes faster. All you have to do is drag and drop to place the items with preconfigured icons. It will support you in the creation of a functional web page and in the planning of user interfaces.
It has a template store so you can find inspiration through the work of other designers. You can also use it from the mobile application!
In just a matter of minutes, Mockflow allows you to design and assemble a web prototype. However, its free version only allows you to create a project with 4 pages. But you can download them in a variety of formats and delete them when you don’t need them.
10. Pixabay
Pixabay is an image editing tool that you can use for free. It is a dynamic community of creatives who share images and videos without copyright.
With Pixabay, you may copy, modify, distribute and use the images you prefer, even for commercial purposes, without requesting permission or attributing their authorship. You can also download videos from various categories and in different resolutions. However, the content shown may be protected by trademarks, advertising or the right to privacy.
Pixabay offers graphic resources for designers. In total, more than 900,000 free photo files, vectors and illustrations, and you can perform searches. The photos are presented in different formats and resolutions, so you can choose the one that fits your project.
Pixabay also allows you to download videos at no cost. You have the option to filter by the most recent, ascending order, the most popular and author selection. Among the effects, you can choose between animation, slow motion or lap time, to locate the most suitable video. And as with the photos, you can filter by different categories and resolutions (in this case any size, HD and 4K).
Take Away on Tools for Web Designers
The world of web design tools is increasingly wide, but there are some that stand out more than others. Whether your a web design agency, freelance web developer or a small business owner that manages your own projects. It's always a good idea to be familiar with such web design tools. The benefits of learning how to use such tools will only help your day to day activities. More importantly, you’d be able to deliver your projects at a faster rate!
Happy Web Designing, graphic work or even creating images for online marketing! Visualwebz is a local Seattle Web Design agency that specializes in online marketing, SEO and of course website development!
