Web design is crucial for any business today. Prospective clients, buyers, stakeholders, partners, and vendors, everyone likes to get to know a company through its website. The site is the face of the business, which is why it needs to be designed well. As a result, web designers are continuously looking for new tricks to come up with better designs. We spoke to a number of web design experts, and they recommended some handy web designer tools to us. However, before we head to that, let us see some of the layers that a useful design tool should have.
A palette is a library of colors, typefaces, and fonts of different sizes that help bring the design to life. A good design tool should be able to support all these features of a palette.
Assets comprise of illustrations, images and specific icons that a webpage needs to have. An excellent design tool would incorporate image editors and also provide SVG support effortlessly.
Component Library
Different styles and assets are held together in a library of components which includes input mechanisms, buttons, and even badges.
Modules
Every website needs specific components such as tables, forms for logging in, header bars, and tabs showing different menus. These components are held together in a composition or a module.
Screens
Assets, modules, and components are brought together on a screen to create the user interface for a website. It is the front end of the site which the visitors interact with.
The above components should form part of any useful design tool. There are hundreds of web design tools, but only a few of them allow ease of use along with great functionality. Here, we are going to look at the top ten tools which are some of the favorites of professional designers all over the world.
CSS refers to cascading style sheets, and it is a useful language for detailing how a website gets presented, and takes into account the fonts, colors, and other layout elements. Web designers often have a problem with the typography, and Type Nugget is a useful tool which helps with the size of the font, the weight and style, and spacing. It can also help with the font colors and other decorations on the letters. Right now the beta version of this tool is available for use.
Virtual Reality (VR) has caught the imagination of technology experts as well as users very quickly and is being added to websites more and more. The VR elements of a site provide a three-dimensional feel to specific features on the website. The Hologram WebVR tool can help the designer integrate several 3D objects. It runs on Mozilla, using their WebVR framework called A-Frame.
Apart from the practical help it provides, one significant advantage of this tool is that it allows designers to collaborate in real time as they create the design and build a prototype. It helps to design anything from wireframes for landing pages to user dashboards. The designs made using this tool are responsive to multiple devices including mobiles. It is also available on various platforms including Windows and Linux.
Several websites augment the usual content of text and images with short animation clips to drive home a specific message in a fun way. Anime is a library containing useful animated components which can be used by any web designer New York. The animations have easy-to-use APIs which can be used on specific elements like CSS selectors, DOM elements, and JavaScript objects.
It is an elegant tool to help web designers. It works on the minimalist principle of breaking down design elements into their smallest parts. It has given rise to what is called atomic design because the atom is the smallest particle possible. The small components are reusable and can be replicated in other sets of code as well, which helps to improve user interfaces wherever they are used.
The name Bootstrap is familiar to most designers, with its first version being launched as far back as 2011. However, we are talking about the version 4 here, which was released towards the end of 2017. This new version comes with several useful changes which help to provide an excellent development experience. Some of these changes include the increase in global font size, refactoring of components to use classes, enhanced support for Flexbox, and the addition of cards components to replace older ones.
Equipped with a robust API, this text editor is best suited for all the modern websites that clients demand. All that it needs are a few simple lines of JavaScript. The tool comes equipped with themes and separate modules like toolbar, keyboard, clipboard and browsing history. The tool also provides a delightful feature called ‘playground’ which allows a designer to try the code first.
When web designers want to develop apps which are functional on various devices, one problem they face is switching between multiple screens while they are testing the app’s functionalities. This tool allows the web designer to view the several displays at once so that he or she can get comparable views of the codes and changes made in them simultaneously.
It is a prototyping tool that is useful and yet different from other similar tools. It does not have any palette of layers. It helps you design prototypes which are very close to the final production output. You get the option of adding screen transitions and even basic interactions to images.
Traditionally, Photoshop has been used by web designers for creating user interfaces on websites. However, Sketch is the preferred choice now owing to its ease of sorting all documents and making edits to them. It is a vector based application which has an inbuilt grid system.
We are sure that judicious use of the above tools will make web designing a much more efficient and pleasurable experience. Both experienced, and novice designers can use these to make their job smooth and hassle-free.
Author Bio – Barrack Diego is a freelance content writer. He has written many good and informative articles on different categories such as Web Design, SEO and Business. He is very responsible towards his job. He loves to share his knowledge and experience with his friends and colleagues.
