5 Online Tools to Help Web Designers

Thanks to HTML5, there are more online tools for designers than ever before. That’s a good thing — the richer the tools, the richer the content, the greater the potential — but it’s hard not to get overwhelmed in such a flooded design ecosystem. While we could write a good sales pitch for dozens of tools out there, we’ve narrowed it down to the top 5 tools we use in our design work every day — a good place to start.

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5. Layer Styles

As adept at writing CSS as you might be, there are always a lot of time-consuming style issues to be contended with. Layer Styles cuts down the time it takes to generate CSS styles by combining options like background, border, border radius, drop shadow and radius, all of which can also be used individually. Layer Styles also takes the guesswork out of the equation, making it easier to tweak objects until they’re just right. Plus, if you hadn’t guessed, it looks and operates much like Photoshop, so it’s easy to use for the majority of designers.

4. Online Font Testing Tool

Choosing a font for your designs can be a long and arduous process, especially when changes involve extra coding and uploads. This online font testing tool uses HTML5 and @font-face to allow designers to quickly view font changes by simply dragging and dropping the font.ttf files into the toolbar — no HTML or CSS alterations required.

3. Shutterstock Images

There are few things quite as good as driving conversion and engagement on websites than professionally-shot stock photos and stock videos. Stock photos and vectors are great for directly representing a site’s product, illustrating a complex service, creating an emotional tenor or voice, and helping site visitors feel like they belong when they see photos of people that reflect who they are and what they do. Stock videos can do much of the same if not more, as most users are more primed and eager to watch videos than they are to read text, no matter how illuminating.

Make sure you avoid these common stock photo cliches.

2. Sprite Toolbox

The great thing about HTML5 is that it allows us to build websites with much richer content. The downside is that it allows us to build websites with much richer content, which can slow download times significantly. Sprite Toolbox is truly a tool of this age, working primarily through jQuery, CSS3 and HTML5 to speed image transition and load times by compressing images into “sprites.” A long overdue tool.

1. Chrome Ajax Animator Tool

Alright, so this one is pure fun, both for designers and for the people who visit our sites. This is a completely web-based animation suite, powered (of course) by HTML5. It works across platforms and formats, and can be used offline just as well as online. And all you need to install it is Google Chrome. It’s a fun, easy to use tool, which makes it better for designers who are just dipping their toes into animation than old pros.