60 Useful Web Design Tools You Should keep in Your Toolbox

If you are a web designer the world of internet is full of things that you can use to help you design better. There are so many tools out there, so you are required to know the specific tools that will help you perform specific tasks to make your life a lot easier.

Here is a collection of 60 Excellent web design toolsd that will provide you with both inspiration and execution of your amazing design ideas. We have suggested websites for stocks, inspirational galleries, color tools, a lot of coding related resources etc.

So here is a list of some amazing galleries and communities that boast countless new ideas for you. You can get in touch with other professionals and share your own creation with people around the world. It is surely a great way to become a better designer.

Tip : 40 Excellent Tools for Designers and Developers

60 Useful Web Design Tools You Should keep in Your Toolbox

DeviantART

DeviantArt (dA) is more than 10 years old site, which is an online community and proves to be an amazing source of inspiration as it boasts art submitted by millions of users. The submitted art is of many types from photography to digital art and even flash, texts etc. It also has some good scripts to many softwares like photoshop actions, brushes etc.

deviantART- where ART meets application!

Ember

Ember is an amazing place to get inspiration from and sharing it with other people. It has the following categories: graphic design, web design, user interface design, photography and interior design.

Welcome to Ember! The best way to share your design inspiration!

Behance

Do you like online portfolio platforms? If so, then Behance Network is one which connects professionals from different industries like photography, fashion and Web Design from all over the planet. It is a great network that provides you with creativity and inspiration and you can make your own portfolio, search for jobs and competitions, exchange tips with others or simply browse.

Behance Network -- Gallery

Creattica

Creattica is a very good gallery in which you can browse and vote other people’s work. You can also upload your own designs and let other people do the same. If your designs can also be featured in gallery which has thousands of views everyday. There are many categories and specific ones like motion graphics, book covers and icon design etc are also present.

Creattica

Dribbble

Designers, developers and other creatives share shots—small screenshots of the designs and applications they are working on.

Dribbble - What are you working on-

Fonts

The fonts that are already installed on your system are simple and plain and sometimes when you want to get a specific type of font like funky or curly etc for some specific thing, finding that right font can be tough as their are thousands of choices to choose from. So here are a few good websites which let you browse font from different categories.

Fontsquirrel

Free fonts have met their match. You can easily find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work.

Font Squirrel - Handpicked free fonts for graphic designers with commercial-use licenses.

Dafont

Dafont boasts over 11,000 fonts and also has some amazing links to font-related tools you might need.

Web Design Tools

Urbanfonts

Urbanfonts has more than 8,000 fonts that are divided into different categories.

Web Design Tools

What the Font?

What the Font? is a great font analyzing website. All you have to do is to upload the picture of the font and then the website will analyze and match it. You can take a picture of a design you love from your cellphone camera or upload a screenshot to get it analyzed.

Web Design Tools

Web Design Galleries

Here are some web design galleries that are updated quite often and boast amazing designs that you can browse through.

CSS Mania

Web Design Tools

Best Web Gallery

Web Design Tools

CSS Elite

Web Design Tools

 

Icons

Lots and lots of icon sets are being released everyday on various websites. So here are some good websites to browse for icons that will inspire you to make your own.

IconArchive

IconArchive has more than 32,000 icons, which are sorted into different categories.

Web Design Tools

IconFinder

As the name suggests this site lets you search for icons. It was launched in 2007.

Web Design Tools

Find Icons

This is a search engine for icons that lets you search for free icons with advanced search filtering and result matching system.

Web Design Tools

Stock Photo Resources

Some times designers required stock photos for designs so here are some sites from where you can get stock photos and illustrations. There are many sites out there but we have only included a few here.

Stock.xchng

Stock.xchng is a great place to find free-to-use images. It boasts a large collection of images of all kinds, from illustrations to textures. All you have to do is to spend a few minutes looking for the right picture and you will surely find something good!

Web Design Tools

Flickr – Creative Commons

The name of Flickr is enough when we talk about photos but Flickr – Creative Commons is a place where you can find millions of images filed under the specific types of creative commons licenses.

Web Design Tools

Istockphoto

If you want best stock photos and can buy them then iStockphoto is the right place for you. You can not only get photos from here but also illustrations, videos and sound.

Web Design Tools

Photoxpress

Another great source of Stock for Photos

Web Design Tools

 

Color Tools

The most important thing in a design is the color combinations. Various palettes can be found on internet with some good tools related to colors.

0to255

0to255 is a simple tool that helps web designers find variations of any color.

0to255

Kuler

It is a great tool by Adobe which lets you browse, create and share color themes easily. Use it on the internet by using the web version, or download the desktop app – or use it from your favorite Creative Suite program.

Web Design Tools

Colourlovers

As the name suggests it is a community of color lovers, in which you can create and share colors, patterns and pallettes. You can also discuss present trends with other people, and even shop from the online store.

Web Design Tools

Color Hunter

Color Hunter is a website which allows you to create and share color palettes from the pictures.

Web Design Tools

Colorschemedesigner

Build dazzling color schemes with software from ColorSchemer.

Web Design Tools

Coding Related Tools And More

Do you code? If so, these websites will be a great help for you. Check them out.

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox. It allows editing, debugging and monitoring CSS, Html, and JavaScript live. It is the most famous code tool out there.

Web Design Tools

W3C Markup Validation Service

W3C Markup Validation Service lets you check the markup validity of your web documents.

Web Design Tools

W3C CSS Validation Service

Exactly like the one above, but for html containing CSS and CSS only.

Web Design Tools

Typetester

Typetester allows you to do comparison of fonts for the screen online.

Web Design Tools

Typeface.js

Typeface.js lets you embed custom fonts in your web pages.

Web Design Tools

Reflection.js

Reflection.js lets you add reflections to your images easily.

Web Design Tools

FavIcon Generator

FavIcon Generator allows you to create favicons for your websites easily.

Web Design Tools

pForm

pForm allows you to create a simple HTML form quickly and easily.

Web Design Tools

Clean CSS

Clean CSS lets you format and optimize CSS.

Web Design Tools

Net2ftp

Net2ftp is a web based FTP client.

Web Design Tools

Web Developer Extension

Web Developer Extension lets you add a menu and toolbar to browser with many easy to use web developer tools.

Web Design Tools

Online HTML Editor

Online HTML Editor is a WYSIWYG editor with rapid response time and it is also able to upload files and save.

Web Design Tools

Realtime HTML Editor

It is unique and handy. Does not require any plugins.

Web Design Tools

Pencil Project

Pencil Project is a great tool for sketching and prototyping. It can make all types of wireframes and UIs. It boasts various built-in stencils, amazing export options and much more. It is a Firefox extension but it is also available as standalone with windows/GNU linux.

Web Design Tools

Cacoo

It is a handy online drawing tool. It lets you make diagrams and charts nicely. It provides nice sharing options.

Web Design Tools

Mockingbird

It has a neat interface with drag-and-drop feature. It lets you do website and app mock-ups.

Web Design Tools

Designers Toolbox

It lets you do standard size specifications for anything e.g envelopes or web banners.

Web Design Tools

 

Spoon

Internet Explorer is supported by Spoon virtualization but is not available on this site by request of Microsoft.

Browsers on Spoon

 

Check Website in Different Browsers

Browsershots

Browsershots is a really good tool using which you can see how your website looks like in different browsers.

Web Design Tools

Spoon Browser Sandbox

It lets you run various browsers without any extra installation.

Web Design Tools

Are My Sites Up?

The name says it all. This tool lets you supervise your websites easily and sends you notification when they are down, and also lets you find out why.

Web Design Tools

Browsercam

Browsercam allows you to view your web design on different browsers and operating systems and check scripts etc.

Web Design Tools

W3counter

It is a free hosted website analytics solution. Noe you can see who is your audience?

Web Design Tools

Best Free Templates

This site boasts great CSS templates that can be downloaded for free.

Web Design Tools

Files, Notes

Some other tools that you should have:

Dropbox

Make online backups and synchronize between different computers with ease. It has some great sharing options and it can be accessed from anywhere.

Web Design Tools

Evernote

It is an amazing tool for text, web site captures etc. Synchronize between different devices.

Web Design Tools

Google docs

Create and share text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings and forms online. Surely an amazing tool for anyone.

Web Design Tools

Cheat Sheets

Some great time-saving tools that let you do your work in a better way with both your programming and software.

Quickly Code

It has a large collection of cheat sheets.

Web Design Tools

DevCheatSheet

DevCheatSheet is an amazing site with many sheets.

Web Design Tools

Mega Collection of Cheatsheets for Designers and Developers

It boasts a collection of over 100 cheatsheets for Spyre Studios. Software shortcuts and much more can also be found here.

Web Design Tools

Online Image Editors

Online Image Editors can make editing quite easy. So here are some good online editors.

Photoshop.com

Obviously, Photoshop! You can do cropping, resizing and other things using it. It also lets you store a some of your pictures.

Web Design Tools

Pixlr

A great tool with many useful features.

Web Design Tools

jQuery UI

jQuery UI is an open source library of interface components — interactions, full-featured widgets, and animation effects — based on the stellar jQuery javascript library.

jqueryui-web-designer-tools-usefulClean AJAX

Clean is an open source engine for AJAX, that provides a high level interface to work with the AJAX technology.

cleanajax-web-designer-tools-useful

Refelction.js

Reflection.js allows you to add reflections to images on your web pages. It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep your code clean.

reflection-web-designer-tools-useful

So these were our 60 must have tools for a designer, which let you save time and money, both. Although we can’t restrict this list to 60. This tool kit still continue with your additions…..

Which Are Your Favorites?
Tell us which one is your favourite out of these? and do tell us in comments if we missed your favourite tool.


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With a passion for Knowledge, Smashinghub has been created to explore things like Free Resources For Designers, Photographers, Web Developers and Inspiration.

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9 Comments

  1. Bruce says:

    Just an fyi, Ember is closing on Sept. 30th this year. Nice list!

  2. Wow, A very extensive list. Thank you. There are a lot I was not aware off.

  3. Great collection, so many great tools and resources. I use mostly the popular ones, but there are a few here that I have not seen before.

  4. admin says:

    @jasim for your addition

  5. Great List :)) Every web developer must have inspired. I would like to include two more in the list. One is patterntap, http://patterntap.com which is User Interface showcase and another is UICart http://uicart.com Its showcases Best User Interfaces in Good Sites and have facility to search with multiple colors