Working in the web design industry, you cannot expect to stay competitive with other web designers if you don’t keep up-to-date with the latest tools and techniques. To help you stay on top of your game, we give you some tools that will make your life easier and your work more productive.
Parallax One
Parallax One is an quality free WordPress theme recently released by the talented developers at Themeisle. It’s been checked thoroughly for browser compatibility and comes with a useful option panel. The template is responsive and fully customizable. As its name suggests, it comes with a cool parallax effect. Last but not least, if your website is not in english, the theme is localization-ready. You can download it for free on the dedicated page.
Crayon.css
Hexadecimal color names can be a bit cryptic and not so human-friendly. Since developers and web designers are humans too, Crayon.css gives you variables that link color names with their hexadecimal equivalent. Usable with postCSS or with your favourite CSS preprocessor, being it Stylus, Sass or Less.
Instant Update
A new kind of CMS that is amazingly useful if you don’t want to use more traditional ones like WordPress or Drupal. Instant Update turns your HTML pages into editable ones. Setup is super fast, and it comes with live-editing, probably the most user-friendly way for your users to manage their website. It also has an edit-history feature that will prevent any big loss in case of mistake.
Napkin
Napkin is an iPhone app that gives you the possibility to quickly design mockups in your phone. It comes with layer and editing controls that turn it into a powerful web design tool. You can download it for free on the App Store.
Iconstore.co
Looking for icons but you don’t want to pay for it? It’s ok, we are greedy to and enjoy our freebies, especially quality ones. It you are like us, you should definitely bookmark iconstore.co, a useful website that collects quality icons created by top class designers.
Coverr
Although the effect is visually appealing, I’m not a too big fan of background videos when it’s overused. When used sparringly and on appropriate websites, background videos can be quite awesome too. For that purpose, Coverr will be an incredibly useful resource. It provides you with free stock videos that you can use on your website if you give attribution like the CC license requires.
Unsplash it
You may already know the popular free stock photo website Unsplash. Unsplash it helps you to very quickly take pictures from the site to include them as placeholders in your mockups. Don’t waste time looking for placeholder pictures anymore.
Screenshot builder
For iPhone developers. Save time creating website screenshots that will make your app look gorgeous in the app store, thanks to Screenshot builder.
Stretchy
If you build responsive designs, you should make sure that every element on the page is responsive. This goes for form elements too. Stretchy helps you to get autosizing form elements on your website, making sure that your mobile visitors can also order or contact your from the website.
Font Awesome 4.4
You may already know Font Awesome, a collection of scalable vector icons that you can instantly customize. It’s still free, and was updated to version 4.4 with 66 shiny new icons.
Dragula
Dragula is a script that brings you drag-and-drop features for your web pages. It is so simple to use that it’s scary.
Foundry
Foundry is a free collection of many vector assets for web developers, brought to you by the designers at Thoughtbot.
About the Author
Mirko Humbert
Mirko Humbert is the editor-in-chief and main author of Designer Daily and Typography Daily. He is also a graphic designer and the founder of WP Expert.