Best Web Design Tools Pdf

As a web designer, you know how important it is to stay up-to-date with the latest tools and trends. We know it can be tough to keep track of everything—after all, who has time to read all those articles?

That’s why we’ve put together this handy PDF guide: it’s got all the info you need to know about what’s new in web design and how to use it, along with some quick links so you can get started immediately.

Best Web Design Tools Pdf

01. InVision Studio

InVision Studio aims to cover all bases and be the only UI tool you’ll need. It comes with a bucketload of features to help you create beautiful interactive interfaces, including tools for rapid prototyping, responsive and collaborative design, and working with design systems.

If you’re already using InVision with tools like Sketch, there’s quite a bit of crossover in features. However, Studio’s power lies in the prototyping department, especially if your design involves animation. Rapid prototyping will allow you to create complex and imaginative transitions, enabling you to really achieve the level of animation you desire. Simply figure out how you want to your UI to look at the start of its transition, and then design the end result. InVision Studio works the rest out for you.

On top of that, you can create these custom animations and transitions from a number of gestures and interactions like swiping, clicking, and hovering.

When you’re all done, export your prototypes through InVision and invite people to collaborate. You can view your project on its intended platform – a great way to explore and test your design. Clients will then be able to comment right onto the design.

To top that, you can stop thinking about creating numerous artboards for multiple devices – Studio’s layout engine will adjust your design to any screen automatically. This timesaver gives you space to think so much more about your design.

02. Sketch

Bohemian Coding’s Sketch is one of the most widely-used web design platforms; it’s a highly powerful vector-based tool for building interfaces and prototypes in a collaborative way. Sketch was built especially for making websites and apps so there are no unnecessary features cluttering your interface and it’s faster and more efficient than software that has a broader scope. 

Rory Berry, creative director at Superrb, made the switch to Sketch a few years ago, and highly recommends it. “Compared to Photoshop, sorting all your documents and making revisions on Sketch is much easier,” he begins. “Sketch has small documents whereas Photoshop has large ones. Due to it being a vector-based app, the file sizes are dramatically smaller compared to Photoshop.”

And that’s not all. “The built-in grid system in Sketch is great and makes interface design much easier. I think the overall UI and minimal feel makes it much cleaner to design in and user friendly. Photoshop seems very complicated in comparison.”

The community offers hundreds of Sketch plugins to make your design workflow easier and smoother. 

The downside of Sketch is that it’s only available on Mac, and there are no plans to support other operating systems. This has been a problem, as designers will often want to share .sketch files with developers using Windows. Fortunately there is now a “Sketch for Windows” application called Lunacy that will open and edit .sketch files and eliminate most of this pain – read about it in the Exporting and Converting section of this article. 

Don’t miss our top tips for using Sketch.

03. Adobe XD

Adobe XD offers the best environment for digital projects under the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. If you’re a keen Adobe user and new to XD, you may not find the interface very ‘Adobe’-like to begin with. However, it does stack up to the other leading tools out there. It is a jump if you’ve been designing in Photoshop for a while, too, but very worth it for UI design.

This vector design and wireframing tool keeps getting better, with additions such as support for auto-animation ensuring the tool can keep up with the latest trends in UX. XD includes drawing tools, tools that enable you to define non-static interactions, mobile and desktop previews, and sharing tools for giving feedback on designs. It allows you to select a device-specific artboard size for starting a project, and you can even import popular UI kits, for example Google’s Material Design. 

Crucially, Adobe XD integrates with the rest of Creative Cloud, which means you’ll be able to import and work with assets from Photoshop or Illustrator easily. If you already use other Adobe apps, the UI will feel nice and familiar and shouldn’t present too much of a learning curve.Advertisement

Andrei Robu, design director at Robu Studio in Barcelona, is among its fans. “For quick mockups it’s great,” he says. “It’s a very light interface, with lots of photos loaded in, and great for moodboards. The prototyping is very useful to show clients how stuff works, especially because you can push the content online right away.”Advertisement

Ellis Rogers, graphic designer at Receptional Ltd also recommends it. “When the design/prototype or wireframe is complete, Adobe XD allows you to very quickly select elements and create page transitions for a working prototype, which can be shared via a link,” he explains. “The link also allows you to gather feedback per page, keeping it all organised. The link can be updated within Adobe XD so the client can always see the latest version without having to worry about incorrect versions. It’s an absolute joy to work with.”

04. Marvel

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Marvel is another web design tool that’s great for producing quick ideas, refining an interface to how you want it to look, and building prototypes. Marvel offers a really neat way of building pages, allowing you to simulate your design through a prototype. There are some wonderful integrations for inserting your designs into your project workflow. Interestingly, there’s an integrated user testing feature, which is still fairly unusual in the web design toolscape. It’s all online too, so no need to download anything.

05. Figma

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Figma is an interface design tool that enables multiple designers to collaborate in real-time. This is very effective when you have multiple stakeholders in the project that are involved in shaping the outcome. It’s available in the browser, or on Windows, Mac or Linux, and there are both free and paid versions depending on what you use it for.

Here are some of its outstanding features:

“Figma has a similar USP as Sketch, with the exception of being cross-platform,” explains front-end designer Benjamin Read. “When I used it to create a couple of icons I found the workflow incredibly smooth. It took me no time to learn and had the added benefit of being collaborative: you can share graphics with others within the app.”

“I’ve been trying to switch to Linux for my work and sometimes we use Windows, so Figma makes sense to me from a practical standpoint,” he adds.

Freelance content writer and artworker David Eastwood also has good things to say about Figma. “It’s also been a really useful tool when we’ve needed to quickly mock MVTs; sometimes small additions to an existing layout. We love that you can quickly create designs for desktop, tablet and mobile.”

how to design a website using html and css pdf

1. Learn the Basics of HTML

If you are a new to HTML, you may find this HTML for Beginners (Ultimate Guide) useful.

The main element of an HTML structure is an HTML tag.

A tag, for example, looks like this:

<b>SOMETHING</b>

Here, we’re dealing with a <b> tag. This one will bold a piece of text that’s between the opening tag (<b>) and the closing tag (</b>). In this case, that piece of text is SOMETHING.

But there are other tags, just to name a few:

• <i>...</i> will italicize the text between the opening and closing tags
• <u>...</u> will underline it
• <p>...</p> is a paragraph of text
• <h1>...</h1> is the main header on the page

Apart from those simple tags, there are also more complex tags. For example, if you want to build a list like the following:

• Item 1
• Item 2
• Item 3

… you can do that with the following HTML code:

<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
<li>Item 3</li>
</ul>

Or, if you want to add a link to another page, like this one:

This is a link to our homepage

… you can do that with this piece of code:

<a href="https://websitesetup.org/">This is a link to my homepage</a>

Read this to get the full list of HTML tags. It’ll become useful as you’re creating a website with HTML and CSS.

2. Understand HTML Document Structure

Think of your HTML page as if it was built of Legos. You put different bricks on top of one another to end up with a given bigger structure.

But instead of Lego bricks, you get HTML tags…

Here’s the simplest HTML document structure:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Hello, world!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello, world!</h1>
    <p>My first web page.</p>
  </body>
</html>

You can take the code above, copy and paste it to a new file, save the document as index.html, and it’s going to be a perfectly valid HTML page.

Let’s explain the individual parts of this code:

• <!doctype html> – the initial declaration of the document
• <html lang="en"> – another declaration; says that what’s to come next is an HTML document written in English
• <head> – marks the start of the head section; the head section is where all the basic parameters of the page go; most of those are not going to be shown on the screen; they just define what’s going on under the hood
• <meta charset="utf-8"> – defines what character set is used to write the document; no need to spend too much time on this; just use this declaration as is
• <title>Hello, world!</title> – the title of the page; this is what people will see in the title bar of their browsers, e.g.:

• <body> – marks the start of the body section; this is where all the content of the page goes; it’s the main part of an HTML document; let us emphasize this, this section is where you’re going to be including all the content that’s meant to appear on the page
• <h1>Hello, world!</h1> – the main header on the page
• <p>My first web page.</p> – a simple paragraph of text
• </html> – the closing tag of the whole HTML document

An important note here. Working on an HTML file in a basic text app or a complex text processor like MS Word is not a good experience. To make things easy on yourself, install a HTML editor called Sublime Text. It has versions for both Mac and PC, and it is free.

Why is it better? Among other things, it will colorize the syntax of an HTML file. Meaning, it’ll visually distinguish your HTML tags from text content, tag parameters, and other values. Basically, it’ll all become readable. Here’s what our simple HTML structure looks like in Sublime Text:

Okay, back on topic. You can take that new index.html file of yours, copy it to where the main directory of your web server is, and then see that page by navigating to it through a web browser. Don’t get too excited, though; this page will be rather ugly (see below).

Okay, so the page is ugly, how to make it not so?

3. Get to Know CSS Selectors

Just like HTML has its tags, CSS has selectors.

Selectors describe how a given element should behave appearance-wise. Here’s an example of a CSS selector:

p {
    font-size: 18px;
}

This selector indicates that all HTML <p> tags within the document will have a font size of 18px.

However, a more practical way of using CSS selectors is not to restrict all tags of a given type to a certain styling, but rather create different “classes” and assign them to tags one by one.

For example, a class selector in CSS looks like this:

.normal-text {
    font-size: 18px;
}

Notice the dot (.) before the name of the class (normal-text). With the “normal-text” class defined, we can now assign that class to those specific HTML tags that we want to make 18px in size.

For example:

<p class="normal-text">This text is going to be 18px.</p>

Let’s take one more minute to explain all the elements of that piece of CSS code above:

• .normal-text – class definition; everything after the name of the class and between the opening and closing brackets {} defines what the elements assigned to this class will look like
• font-size – an example CSS property
• 18px – a value assigned to the property

There’s a ton of CSS properties apart from the above font-size. Here’s the complete list if you’re curious.

4. Put Together a CSS Stylesheet

An HTML document is very structural – every element has its place, and the order of elements is crucial for the final construction and appearance of the web page in question. A CSS document is a lot less so.

CSS documents are often referred to as stylesheets. Basically, a CSS stylesheet is a list of all the class definitions that are being used in the corresponding HTML document. The order of the class definitions is not that crucial most of the time (at least for simple designs).

The way you put a CSS stylesheet together is by defining each class one by one, and then testing if the outcome in your page design is what you wanted.

This sounds like tedious work, and it is.

But we’ll make things easier on you, and not force you to learn HTML and CSS design by hand. Instead of teaching you everything from scratch, we’ll take a living organism and dissect its elements.

This is where a thing called Bootstrap comes into play.

5. Download/Install Bootstrap

Bootstrap is an open-source toolkit for creating a website with HTML and CSS.

In plain English, Bootstrap takes care of the basic structure of an HTML document and CSS stylesheet for you. It delivers a framework that makes sure that the main scaffolding of your web page is ready and optimized for further development.

Basically, Bootstrap lets you not start from scratch, and instead go right into the fun part. With it, you don’t have to work on the often boring early stages of creating a website with HTML and CSS.

There are two paths you can take:

• Option (a): learn Bootstrap – go to the Bootstrap homepage, download the main Bootstrap package and start building on top of it.
• Option (b): take a shortcut – get a starter pack for Bootstrap with a good-looking design and a demo web page already built.

Option (a) might have some learning curve at the beginning, but it’s not in any way the worse way to approach creating a website with HTML and CSS. Once you master the core Bootstrap structure, it might be easier for you to build new pages and make them look exactly as you want them. The Bootstrap documentation is a great place to get started with this path.

We’re going to go with Option (b) for this guide. We’re doing this for a couple of reasons, chief of them:

Starting with a ready-made structure saves a lot of pain in trying to figure out the basic necessities of an HTML document. This lets you focus on the interesting stuff – like laying out content and making it look good.

In short, learning things this way will give you a better-looking result quicker, which we guess is what you want.

6. Pick a Design

When you’re creating a website with HTML and CSS, you are free to use any Bootstrap template you like. They should all work similarly enough.

However, for this guide, we’re going to use one of the templates by Start Bootstrap. They have a nice selection of free templates that are optimized, work trouble-free, and are also very well designed.

The theme we’re going to use is called Creative. The final effect we’re going for will look something like this:

To begin with, the Creative template, click on the Free Download button that’s on the right (on this page) and save the zip package to your desktop.

Unzip the package and move its contents to the main directory of your local web server or your web hosting account.

Now open that location through your web browser. You’ll see the stock version of the template:

It’s already quite good-looking, but now it’s time to learn how to use HTML and CSS to make it into exactly what you want it to be.

Conclusion

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