Web designing is a process; you cannot just imagine a design in mind and create it – you need the right tools to give it shape. Though tools are not enough; a creative designer must have unique design concepts in mind, they must be able to visualize the end-product in advance and work accordingly. As they proceed towards the final version, they will need a lot of tools to complete the work.
This is not the story of you only; all web designers feel the Importance of web design tools. As demand is the seed of innovation, the designers and developers community has come up with a lot of tools for the web designers. These tools make the life of the designers much easy.
Let’s discuss about some of such tools; let’s see how they can help us. Not all the tools are available for free; however, the list of free tools is quite large too.
Color
To keep things easy to understand and comprehensive, we have categorized the tools under different heads. First, we will discuss about the color tools.
Adobe Kuler
This is a free tool from Adobe. Designers can create, upload and edit color schemes as they want. Adobe Kuler is a great tool indeed.
Pictaculous
This is another free web design tool; this allows you to generate color palette. All you need to do is upload an image; a custom color scheme is created from the colors present in the image. Isn’t it amazing? This great tool comes from the creators of Mailchimp, leading email marketing solution provider.
Colorzilla
Colorzilla is a browser extension that includes an array of color tools such as Gradient Generator, Eye Dropper, Color Picker etc. ColorZilla is available for Firefox and Google Chrome. This comes as a real helping hands for the graphic and web designers and developers.
Dribbble.com
Do you need help choose a color scheme for the new design? Visit dribble.com – there is an explore option in the top menu. Just click on the link and start exploring various colors. Dribble.com is a free tool and great place to find color schemes, color ideas for any design.
Hues
This is a paid color scheme tool. Hues is basically a native app that you can download from app store for $2.99.
Typography
Let’s turn to typography. In this section we will discuss about the tools that are related to web fonts and related stuff.
Google Webfonts
This is a free tool from Google that helps to implement different types of fonts in to a website or application. Google Webfonts is very easy to use.
Font Squirrel
Font Squirrel refers designers to the best places where you can get high quality, hand-picked fonts which can be used for commercial purpose. This is a free tool for the web designers.
Lost Type
They offer a great collection of fonts; web designers can easily find what they exactly need for the designs and finally come up with great and compelling designs. This is a paid type foundry.
Typecast
With Typecast you do not need to download several web fonts; it introduces a different way of showing the fonts inside Photoshop file. Typecast makes it easy for the designers to smoothly proceed with their design work. This tool also allows to stylize, evaluate readability etc. for $29 per month.
Color and font are the two most important elements of any design. No matter whether the design is going to be used on the internet or offline, colors and the font used can have a great impact on the visitors’ mind. The above mentioned free and paid web design tools can actually help you to do some great work with your design.
This article is contributed by Michael Evans who is associated with Cyprus-Web.com, a leading Cyprus website design company.