Useful Resources for Web Designers

I’m always trying to think of useful things to share for those designing their websites – be that a do-it-yourself-er small business owner or an experienced web designer, and I thought I would share 7 of the tools that I find useful for web design:

1 – http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css/propindex/all.htm – All CSS Properties Listed Alphabetically – This site has come in handy many a time for me when I know in my head that I can do something but for the life of me I can’t remember what the code was. This way I can look it up if I remember basically how it starts and it can remind me.  Another thing that I find handy is it tells you all the different values that you can use as well, so if you’re not sure if you can adjust something or not it will let you know.

2 – http://www.w3schools.com/ – Coding Assistance From HTML and CSS, to AJAX and jQuery – This website has been one of my reference tools from day one of designing sites for my clients. I can look up pretty much any code that I would need to use and they even have testing windows so you can test how different values and properties will act.  It comes in really handy if you want to try a new property in CSS for example that you haven’t used before and you want to know what you can do with it and how it works.  Or if you know a property but aren’t sure what one of the values may do.  Very handy.

3 – http://kuler.adobe.com – Adobe Kuler Colour Palette Creating – With this website you can choose different colour palettes.  Different users have submitted their own colour palettes, you can use some Adobe has created, or you can use a colour wheel and select different palette types (complementary, monochrome, etc) and by selecting a main colour it will help you choose additional colours.  It provides the hex codes, CMYK or RGB values – VERY HANDY!  Useful not only for web design but ANY graphic design – from logos to websites!

4 – http://www.colr.org/ – Colour Schemes from Pictures – This website lets you reference a picture online or upload a picture from your computer and will find different colours in that picture and you can form your colour scheme from a picture. So if you have a picture or drawing that you LOVE the colours in you can upload it to this site and use the colours from it, super handy if you’re having troubles matching the colours to your satisfaction.

5 – http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ – Find Out What a Font is From a Picture – I use this site ALL THE TIME. When I’m using an existing design and carrying it into different mediums I may not know what font the initial designer used, particularly if it’s saved as an image and not as text. What this site allows you to do is upload or reference an image online and it will tell you what fonts match those in the image. It works best if you can focus on one font in an image at a time – so if you’re looking at a logo with a company name and tagline in different fonts for example, it’s easiest to focus on just the tagline or company name and do it in two steps.

6 – http://www.typetester.org/ – Compare Fonts on One Screen – This site helps you decide on a font to use for different designs – be that web or traditional media. If you want to compare Bookman Old Style to Times New Roman, you can.  Or see if you like a sans serif font instead of a serif font.  Super handy for testing fonts.

7 – https://browserlab.adobe.com – Multiple Browser Simulation – One thing that every web designer knows is that every browser treats code differently.  Something that make look amazing in Firefox or Chrome may look absolutely awful in Internet Explorer – or the reverse!  Not only that, but what may work well in a current version of a browser may not look good in the previous version of that same browser.  This tool allows you to simulate different browsers and different versions of browsers – and simulate both Mac and PC.  This way you don’t have to have a crazy testing machine set up, you can use this site as your testing tool.

So here’s a few different tools for the web designers and web designers in training!  Hope they can be as helpful to you as they have been to me, and if you have any questions about any of them feel free to contact us at ARK2!

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This entry was posted by Anna Kouwenberg on Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.