Web designers are a discriminating lot when it comes to the tools they choose to use in their business. While many of the best tools are expensive, here are some free tools that I use that work really well and that I find indispensable.
- Kuler (kuler.adobe.com):
Adobe Labs offers a free web app named Kuler for choosing color schemes. It is driven by a database that allows you to work until you find just the right color scheme. Kuler is a Flash application so you will need Flash installed on your computer to use it.Kuler works by allowing you to create color swatches. It provides you with both the RGB and hexadecimal codes for your colors. Once you have created a color swatch you can save it and even download other peoples’ color swatches. One of the best features it offers is that you can extract the color palettes out of images you that you upload or find on Flickr.If you have Adobe Creative Suite you can even download your color palette and use it directly. Choosing color schemes for websites is always tricky but Kuler makes it really easy to mix and match until you find just the right one. - FavIcon Generator (tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon):
Dynamic Drive offers a great free web application for creating favicons for your website. Favicons are images that appear in your browser next to your URL text box and on open tabs.FavIcon Generator works by prompting you to upload any image that you want to turn into an icon. The image can be in JPG, GIF, BMP or PNG format. Once you have your image uploaded you just click Create Icon.Follow the simple instructions on the page and you too can create eye-catching icons for your website which will make your site even more attractive. - BrowserShots (browsershots.org):
After using the W3C Markup Validation Service to make sure all your website pages have valid HTML the next step is then to check to see what they actually look like in the most popular web browsers. In the past you had to install all the most popular web browsers on your computer and then check the pages in each browser. Not anymore.BrowserShots works with a dizzying number of browsers across all the most popular operating systems. You simply check the browsers that you want to see your page in and then enter the URL of your web page and click Submit. The web shots are then queued and can take some time before they are displayed, but it is a lot quicker than trying to check them all yourself manually. It even gives you a time estimate on how long it will take before you can see your browser shots. If you are in a hurry, you can click on the Details link and see the queue time by browser.You can also fine tune your selection further by selecting what screen size and color depth you want. Additional options include enabling JavaScript, Flash and/or Java so you can see what your page looks like in all of the most common cases. - Dropbox (dropbox.com):
Microsoft once introduced a concept on Windows that was called Briefcase for synchronizing your files with other computers. Briefcase was clumsy and persnickety to use, but the concept was good. Dropbox is Briefcase done right.After downloading and installing Dropbox on your computer, there is an icon on your desktop that you can drag files to and have them automatically show up in the Dropbox folder on all the computers in your network. Dropbox even works over the Internet as each file is also added to another folder on the Dropbox site itself.File sharing just can’t get much easier than this. Dropbox works with Windows, Macs, Linux and iPhones. So now instead of emailing documents and photos to your business clients simply share your Dropbox folder with them to so they can view them immediately. - Google Docs (docs.google.com):
No list of web designer tools could be complete without including Google Docs. It is both a spreadsheet and word processor that is free to anyone with a Google account. It works seamlessly with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer so there are no compatibility issues. But the most powerful feature of Google Docs is its ability to collaborate on a document with others over the Internet.Inside the word processor you can change fonts, font sizes and colors just like in Word. All of the most popular features are also there such as page numbering, bullets, alignment control, tables and spacing. While it doesn’t offer more advanced features like headers, footers, footnotes or search and replace it does offer most of the features that people need to write basic documents.
