This is a blog about web design, but it’s not just a blog about web design. It’s also a blog about how to use tools that make your life easier as you work on the website you’re creating or maintaining.
We’ll be covering everything from code editors and tools designed to help you write better CSS to plugins that can make your life easier while you’re designing and developing your site. We’ll also be looking at some of the most popular design frameworks out there, so you know which ones are worth using and which ones aren’t.
You’ll find this blog useful if you’re just starting out with web development, but even experienced designers will find something new here too!
Examples Of Web Design Tools
There are so many great web design tools around these days, created to help you with mockups, frameworks, testing, and more. You’ll also find an abundance of downloads on the many elements that make up good web design, including but not limited to VR, animation, colours, and typography.
No matter what problem you’re trying to solve in your web design workflow it’s likely that someone has made a tool for it, whether it’s a standalone utility or a feature within a larger app. The even better news is that so many of these great tools are free, although this does make the array of tools on offer far more daunting to choose from.
To help web creatives out, we’ve rounded up what we think are the best tools around right now (for a more specific list, see this UI design tools roundup). As this is quite a long list, we have arranged the tools into sections to make the article easier to navigate. On this page, you’ll find complete web design software such as Sketch and Adobe XD, followed by more basic dedicated wireframing tools, and web design frameworks and libraries. On page two, there’s a range of smaller, more specialised tools for everything from working with images to ensuring inclusivity in your work.
While you’re here, you might want to check out our roundup of the best web hosting services, and choose one of the best website builders, too.
RECOMMENDED VIDEOS FOR YOU…
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COMPLETE DESIGN TOOLS
- InVision Studio
InVision aims to be the only UI tool you’ll ever need
InVision aims to be the only UI tool you’ll ever need (Image credit: InVision)
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.
- Sketch
Sketch has replaced Photoshop as the UI design tool of choice for many web designers [Image: Bohemian Coding]
Sketch has replaced Photoshop as the UI design tool of choice for many web designers [Image: Bohemian Coding] (Image credit: Bohemian Coding)
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.
- Adobe XD
Adobe XD has a light interface that allows you to prototype with ease
Adobe XD has a light interface that allows you to prototype with ease (Image credit: Adobe)
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.
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.”
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.”
- Marvel
Marvel
Marvel comes with an integrated user testing tool (Image credit: Marvel)
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.
- Figma
web design tools: Figma screengrab
Figma allows you to design, prototype and gather feedback with other designers in real time [Image: Figma]
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.”
- Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer is as powerful on iPad as it in on desktop [Affinity Designer]
Affinity Designer is as powerful on iPad as it in on desktop [Affinity Designer] (Image credit: Serif)
“Serif’s Affinity Designer has been dubbed the ‘Photoshop killer’ by some, and it’s easy to see why,” says product designer Dan Edwards. “There were a few features I really enjoyed, including adjustable, non-destructive layers. This essentially means you can adjust images or vectors without damaging them.
“The 1,000,000 per cent zoom was just bliss; it’s especially useful when working with vector art, as you can really get in close. The undo and history features are also really handy: Affinity allows you to go back over 8,000 steps!”
“When it comes to designing, the UI feels familiar. When moving from Photoshop, everyone seems to want to start over, which can pose a real challenge. What Affinity has done is to keep the layout familiar, while tightening everything up and hiding distractions. I was easily able to jump straight in and get designing.”
Affinity Designer is also available for the iPad. And note that this is not the scaled-down mobile app version you might expect: it’s the same full version you get on the desktop.
Don’t miss our guides to using the Pixel persona, the Export persona and the Pen tool in Affinity Designer. Also note that Serif also makes a Photoshop alternative, Affinity Photo and an InDesign alternative, Affinity Publisher; all of which play together nicely.
MOCKUPS AND PROTOTYPES
- UXPin
UXPin: web design tools
UXPin lets you prototype with interactive states and logic (Image credit: UXPin)
The next web design tool in our list is UXPin. This dedicated prototyping app is available for Mac, Windows, or in the browser. With most other design tools you can only mimic interactions by linking different elements on your artboard, UXPin gets closer to the code and enables you to work with interactive states, logic, and code components.
There are integrated element libraries for iOS, Material Design and Bootstrap, plus hundreds of free icon sets, to help you on your way. UXPin also has accessibility features to ensure your designs stay in line with WCAG standards, which we applaud.
You can create your first prototype in UXPin for free, and if it suits you switch to a paid monthly subscription (team memberships are available). UXPin also has great integration with Sketch, so it could be one to introduce into your workflow if you’re a Sketch fan that finds its prototyping capabilities limiting.
- Proto.io
This tool helps you create lifelike prototypes
This tool helps you create lifelike prototypes (Image credit: Proto.io)
Proto.io is a top application that allows for the inception of lifelike prototypes that begin with rough ideas and end with fully fledged designs. The tool also provides you with a range of possibilities for your projects, including detailed and custom vector animations.
You can start by developing initial ideas with a hand-drawn style, work them into wireframes, and finish them off with a high-fidelity prototype. The Sketch and Photoshop plugins help if you want to design using other tools, but Proto.io handles the end-to-end design process well. Other features – user-testing, for example – will help validate your designs. This is an all-in-one solution with a great number of trusted brands already using it.
There are a bunch of great demos to start playing with, and you can really see just how easily this end-to-end solution could replace a number of tools currently in place. Proto.io also offers assets managers, developer guides, and the ability to record your prototype, making it one of the better prototyping tools out there.
- Balsamiq
Balsamiq interface
Balsamiq is great for rapid wireframing (Image credit: Balsamiq)
If rapid, efficient wireframing is what you’re looking for then Balsamiq is a strong suggestion. You can quickly develop a structure and layouts for your projects with ease. Drag-and-drop elements make life easier, and you can link buttons to other pages. By wireframing, you can quickly start to plan your interfaces and share them with your team or clients. Balsamiq has been going since 2008 and prides itself on its low-fidelity, fast, focused no-nonsense approach.
- ProtoPie
Start playing around with native sensors using this tool
Start playing around with native sensors using this tool (Image credit: ProtoPie)
Web design tool ProtoPie allows you to create complex interactions and get close to your design’s ideal end function. Perhaps the standout feature is the ability to control the sensors of smart devices in your prototype, such as tilt, sound, compass and 3D Touch sensors.
Depending on your project, this is a great tool for those that want to encompass native app features. It’s easy as pie and no code is required.
- MockFlow
MockFlow
This tool is great for mocking up rough ideas (Image credit: MockFlow)
MockFlow is a suite of applications for wireframing and planning websites. WireframePro helps you to set out your initial idea and then iterate until it’s just right – there’s a UI revision tracker to help you with this. It comes with thousands of pre-built components and layouts that you can adjust to meet your requirements, and there’s a preview mode for presenting your work to colleagues and clients.
Once you’ve done your wireframes, the rest of the suite can help you with other aspects of planning your website including information architecture, making a style guide (this can be generated automatically), and working through a sign-off process.
If you’d like to see some other options, check out our roundup of top wireframe tools.
- Adobe Comp
Adobe Comp is a fantastic web design tool for the iPad that assists in the creation of wireframes, prototypes and layout concepts for web pages. A Creative Cloud-powered intelligent sketchpad, if you like. It has basic templates for a number of layouts for mobile and web, and even print if that’s your thing, and you can create quick placeholders by drawing intuitive shapes to represent images, text and more. Comp converts rough outlines into straight lines, circles and rectangles.
Bewilderingly, Adobe has not seen fit to include direct export to XD – crazy! – despite a long-standing request that has been under review for what seems like forever. However, exporting to Photoshop is built-in (along with Illustrator and InDesign), and once tweaks to your mockup are made in the ubiquitous image editor you can then export from there to XD. Despite this unwelcome extra step in the Adobe devotee wireframer’s user journey, Comp fully deserves its inclusion in this list with its go-anywhere capabilities, ease-of-use, and impressive UI.
- Flinto
Flinto interface
Design the before and after states, and Flinto will work out the difference and animate for you (Image credit: Flinto)
Flinto is a design tool that allows you to create unique interactions within your designs. You can utilise a number of gestures, and make easy transitions by designing the before and after states. Flinto simply works out the differences and animates for you – super helpful.
Bear in mind that this is iOS only, but it will feel familiar when you start using it. There’s documentation online to help you on your way, and importing from Sketch and Figma is straightforward too.
- Axure
Axure interface
Wireframe complex interfaces with dynamic data (Image credit: Axure)
Axure has always been one of the best wireframing tools on the market, great for complex projects that require dynamic data. With Axure, you can really focus on mocking up projects that are both technical and require key attention on structure and data.
Axure’s hand-off process includes the creation of thorough specifications that help developers to create a final product that matches your designs.
- Justinmind
Justinmind
Justinmind integrates with tools such as Sketch and Photoshop (Image credit: JustInMind)
Justinmind will help with prototyping, and integrates with other tools like Sketch and Photoshop. You can choose your interactions and gestures to help assemble your prototype. It also contains UI kits, so you can put together screens quickly, and it’s responsive, too.
- Fluid
Fluid interface
Fluid is great for speedy UI design (Image credit: Fluid)
Fluid is a simple and intuitive tool for building rapid prototypes and working up designs. It packs some nice out-of-the-box assets to get you going with rapid prototypes. Once you’ve upgraded, it’s really easy to assemble your own symbols with your own preferred UI assets. This tool offers very fast UI design, with assets available for both high and low fidelity prototypes.
- Framer
Framer web design tool
Framer helps to keep teams on the same page (Image credit: Framer)
Framer is a prototyping system that improves communication and collaboration on your team, especially between designers and developers. It is built with design systems in mind, and integrates with your code to generate documentation that is easy to follow and updates automatically. Keeping everyone on the same page and up to date is a core function – so when your code updates, so does your design.
DESIGN FRAMEWORKS AND LIBRARIES
- Bootstrap
web design tools: Bootstrap screengrab
Old favourite Bootstrap has some powerful new updates
Bootstrap is certainly not a new tool, but it has revolutionised development and continues to shape how we build stuff on the web. Features to look out for include responsive containers that are fluid up to a certain breakpoint, and responsive .row-cols classes for specifying the number of columns across breakpoints efficiently.
Bootstrap also has its own open source icon library, Bootstrap Icons, that is designed to work with Bootstrap components.
Find the best free Bootstrap themes in our guide.
- Startup 4
Make a Bootstrap site without writing code [Image: Designmodo]
Make a Bootstrap site without writing code [Image: Designmodo] (Image credit: Designmodo)
If you like Bootstrap but don’t want to dive into the raw thing, Startup 4 is the easy way; it’s an online app with built-in templates and themes for building websites based on Bootstrap 4 with a 12-column grid. You can build your site without writing code using the drag-and-drop interface, but you will need some knowledge of HTML and CSS to finish things up.
- Vue.js
web design tools: vue.js screengrab
Not used to complex JavaScript libraries? Vue.js is perfect for you [Image: Vue.js]
Vue.js is a framework for building user interfaces, and uses a virtual DOM. As the name suggests, Vue’s core library is focused on the view layer.
Look at a code example, taken from Vue’s docs, that utilises user input and demonstrates the library’s elegance. We’ll start with the HTML:
{{ message }} Reverse Message
Notice the custom v-on handler that calls the reverseMessage method. Here’s the JavaScript:
var myApp = new Vue({
el: ‘#example’,
data: {
message: ‘Hello Vue.js!’
},
methods: {
reverseMessage: function () {
this.message = this.message.split(”).
reverse().join(”)
}
}
});
This example populated the paragraph with data and defines the reverseMessage method. Vue is great for those less experienced with complex libraries, but also has a number of plugins to help with development of complex single-page web apps.
- Pattern Lab
web design tools: Pattern Lab screengrab
Pattern Lab is based around Atomic Design [Image: Pattern Lab]
Pattern Lab is a beautiful pattern-driven design tool created by Dave OIsen and Brad Frost. It’s based on the concept of Atomic Design, which says that you should break your design down into its smallest parts – atoms – and combine them to form bigger, reusable components – molecules and organisms – that can then be turned into usable templates.
Although at its core it’s a static site generator that stitches together UI components, there’s much more to Pattern Lab than that. It’s language-and tool-agnostic; it enables you to nest UI patterns inside each other and design with dynamic data; it features device-agnostic viewport resizing tools to help you ensure your design system is fully responsive; and it’s fully extensible so you can be sure it’ll expand to meet your needs.
- Material Design
Material Design is a set of principles from Google [Image: Google]
Material Design is a set of principles from Google [Image: Google] (Image credit: Google)
Material Design is a visual language from Google that aims to combine the classic principles of good design with innovations in technology and science to create a cohesive and flexible foundation your website.
Websites and apps created using the Material Design framework will look modern and be familiar to the user, so people will find it easy to use your product right away. There are many tools available to help with this design system; click Resources on the nav bar to find them.
design tools examples
If you are a graphic or web designer, you would certainly be using a number of different tools to carry out your day-to-day tasks. However, choosing the right set of tools to make your day productive and work amazing is easier said than done; especially when there are virtually countless tools for web and graphic design professionals available in the market.
Now, the question that arises here is how do you find the right one?
Well, to help you in this task we have compiled a list of 21 best designer tools for web and graphic design professionals that are highly recommended. Check out the list and you can eventually choose the ones that fit aptly within your requirement:
“Simplify the way you manage your projects and teams.” Switch to ProofHub!
Table of Contents [show]
25 best designer tools for web and graphic design professionals
- ProofHub – Proofing tool
ProofHub – desinger tool for web graphic designers
Designing teams are overloaded with creative work that includes discussions regarding the design, drafting the framework for the design, making changes and many other things to handle. The design you make will be checked at multiple levels before it gets final. And the whole process includes countless changes, several feedback and many things. So, the biggest challenge that comes for designers is proofing.
An online proofing tool like ProofHub for designing teams will help you manage all your tasks easily and hassle-free. The client can easily explain to you small changes like- Hey, shift this text here, or add color to this portion of the design. It eliminates the game of emails, feedback and approvals and reduces the time consumed for the entire process. With an online proofing tool like ProofHub, you can make changes in your file instantly, add comments, highlight the flaws in the design while keeping everyone in loop.
- Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop as designer tool
Launched in 1988, Photoshop has become a staple in the life of designers. Imagine a program to take your artistic style into a digital world with confidence, a program that compliments your artistic style. Photoshop is an extremely powerful program for creating prints and patterns to be the best you can be in the designing world. For graphic designers it has countless options, tools, and settings to open up new opportunities, to create design that is more authentic with proper guidance.
Photoshop for Designers allows you to:
Build confidence in your design skills
Enjoy the new insights
Create digital artwork based off your drawings
Learn from step-by-step instruction
A wonderful way to learn and remember
Speed up your design process
Bring your ideas to life
Stay motivated through daily emails and lessons
- Adobe Illustrator – Create logos, icons and sketches
Adobe Illustrator as web & graphic designer tool
Adobe Illustrator offers 2D or 3D graphics manipulation to increase efficiency in the design workflow. Designers including both professional graphic designers and digital artists can use Illustrator to create many different types of digital products. Adobe keeps rolling out exciting features in Illustrator like variable fonts, faster document creation, easier image cropping, stylist sets to texts, stability enhancements, and modern user experience and many more to make it one of the best and most handy tools for web and graphic designers. - Filestage
FileStage
Filestage is an online review and approval tool that gives graphic designers complete control over the content review process. The tool makes it simple for graphic designers to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders on a range of file types including images, PDFs, websites, and more. The tool places a strong emphasis on ease of use. This means that your stakeholders are able to easily leave their in-context feedback to move your project forward. An integrated to-do list gives you a laser-focus on feedback and makes sure you don’t miss a single comment.
Filestage also shows the status of projects at a glance. In just a moment you can see which stakeholders have approved your design and which ones are yet to review your work.
- PicsArt
PicArt Photo Editor tool for graphic designer
PicsArt’s all-in-one online Photo Editor features endless editing tools to help you create professional-grade content even if you don’t have any experience in the designing field. They even house an impressive Video Editor you can use to add music and effects to videos. The app — which also has a desktop web editor — also boasts one of the largest creative communities in the world.
The best part is that unlike professional-grade editors, PicsArt’s tools are intuitive, easy to use, and free. There is a wide range of creative web tools for businesses, making the editing experience on desktop much more efficient. From AI-powered background removal to creating designs from scratch, PicsArt offers all the necessary tools for you to succeed in content creation, social media, and web marketing efforts. PicsArt goes above and beyond the basic effects with trendy designs and Magic effects that completely transform images. New effects and tools are added frequently, so there’s always room for more creativity.
Their most recent addition is an exclusive feature called Replay, which allows you to apply editing steps to your photos in just a few taps. With hundreds of unique and impressive photo effects and design tools at your fingertips, your content will definitely stand out with PicsArt.
- Desygner
Desygner designer tool
Desygner’s editor is an online-based Illustrator alternative that is super simple to use. Drag & drop elements into the design, replace images with one click, change fonts, colors, and text. Work with layers and multiple pages at ease.
Search Royalty-free images directly from Desygner using any keyword and find the highest quality royalty-free images to customize your designs.
In addition to:
– Thousands of pre-made templates
– Thousands of icons & shapes
– Hundreds of web fonts & pre-made banners
– Free Brand Library: where you can set up and organize your assets like colors, fonts, texts, images, videos and use them directly in the editor.
– In-built PDF Editor: gives you the ease of being able to edit PDF files and documents no matter where and when they were created. - DesignBold
DesignBold as design tool for web& graphic designerDesignBold is a user-friendly online design tool (basically a simplified version of Photoshop) which helps you create stunning designs within only several drags-and-drops. With a massive library of 12,080++ customizable layouts and myriad design resources, DesignBold is a great choice for you to build the website elements yourself. For instance, a logo, a header or any other types of visuals for your website content. It is quick, cost-effective and suitable for both amateur and professional designers. - Fotor – Online edit images & design poster, invitation
Fotor as designer tool
What makes Fotor one of the best tools for web and graphic design professionals out there in the market is that no matter the basic photo editing such as ‘one-tap enhance the image bright and portrait beauty, or making some business promotion stuff poster, card, Fotor is a good assistant for you. Just input your own image or use its stock photo directly, adding some text and stickers to customize it easily. There are a number of Features that are helpful for designers, like:
Design templates
Design stickers
Text and fonts
Cloud saving
- Logaster
Logasteras logo generator designer tool
If you want to create a logo for a small project, but do not want to spend a lot of time, then you can use an online logo generator Logaster. This tool will help you create many designs in a matter of minutes. Besides, you can create business cards and social media images with your logo. Created logos can be edited and downloaded or simply used for inspiration. - Mockplus – free online collaborative prototyping tool
Mockplus as designer tool
Mockplus is a must-have prototyping tool for web and graphic design professionals to create fully interactive and mobile-friendly web and mobile app prototypes in minutes. As a prototyping tool aiming to help users design and collaborate better in one place, Mockplus makes it super easy for teams to co-design on the same project at the same time. A single share link is all you need to invite teammates, share designs, collect feedback, test and iterate your prototypes together.
Simple and easy-to-understand interfaces make you focus on design ideas instead of spending time in learning it;
A wide range of icons, compos and templates makes it easy to create their own projects ASAP；
A full set of interactions and animations helps you create very real web and app prototypes;
Have multiple users or even a whole team design on the same page without conflicts;
Draw and combine vector shapes to create your own logos, components and illustrations with ease.
- Marvel – Prototyping tool
Marvel – Prototyping tool for designers
Prototyping is an imperative part of the web design workflow these days. With Marvel, you can create anything from scratch, and even sync designs from your cloud storage! Prototype and add gestures and transitions to your design. Marvel has a highly simplified interface that makes it fast and easy to learn. The tool works well for both non-designers and advanced UX folks. - Pixelmator – Image editor
Pixelmator – Image editor for designers
Pixelmator Pro is a tool for designers packed with innovations. It features an elegant single window interface and simplified editing tools with intelligent image editing features. It is the perfect tool for building up multiple projects with intuitive tools for moving, resizing, and arranging layers. Pixelmator Pro is also crafted with a unique collection of handcrafted brushes to bring out the painter in you. The brushes have dual textures giving a unique dynamic blend to your art. So, make your design look as beautiful as you want with the image editor tool. - Sublime text – Text editor
Sublime text – Text editor designer tool
Sublime text is the text editor that you are surely going to fall in love with. A minimalist coding editor, it will let you focus completely on your code. If you are working on websites, this will give your great power providing powerful shortcuts and tools to leap about a document, filter the file, and quickly make edits. - Github – Software development platform
Github tool for designer
Writing code is hard. Writing code without Git is unthinkable. Yes, designers can use Github as well. There is a sketch plugin allowing designers to use git directly in Sketch. Git will change the way you code for the best and make your design work enjoyable. It’s a platform that hosts your code on a remote Git server with a nice web interface and allows you to collaborate with other project members on the same server. - Webflow – Responsive web design tool
Webflow – Responsive web designer tool
As one of the most amazing tools for web and graphic design professionals, Webflow allows you to create sites in a relatively short time. You can design and develop at the same time, with minimal effort with webflow. You do not need to know how to code to work with this tool; you can just export and change the site’s html / css tags according to your needs. - Iconfinder
Iconfinder tool for designers
The visual language is getting into a new trend and Iconfinder is the best place for designers to gain inspiration and brilliant icons. It hosts the world’s largest collection of premium icons. You can access all 2,171,326 icons in SVG, PNG and IconJar formats. This is probably the easiest way to get icons with a license that fits commercial purposes. - Coolors – Color scheme generator
Coolors – Color scheme generator tool for designers
Color selection is a big process in designing and often requires a lot of tweaking. This is where Coolors comes as a great tool. It is a superfast color scheme generator that creates, saves and shares the perfect palette in seconds. Choose your favorite colors and get your Material Design palette generated and downloadable. Save them to your account, or export them as .PNG, .PDF, .SVG, and more. Coolors is also available as an iOS App, Adobe Add-on and a Chrome Extension. - Palleton – A color scheme
Palleton – A color scheme designer tool
Colors will bring life to any design and a designer knows the huge importance of a good color scheme. Palleton is a designer tool for creating color combinations that work together well. If you need some help coming up with a color scheme for your website, Palleton will give you some amazing combinations. Choose your colors on a color wheel and select from some tried color combinations such as Monochromatic, Adjacent Colors, Triad, Tetrad, and Freestyle. - Diigodiigo as tool for designers
Diigo is a great tool for web and graphic designers that helps them to easily highlight any part of a web page and add sticky notes to it. What separates it from others on the list is that it can be used as a social bookmarking tool as well where you can tag others and share pages. With Outliner in Diigo, you can structure your research by automated streamlining or by your own personal customization. All thanks to its advanced features, more than 9 million users are already using Diigo. - Pixlr
Pixlr photo editing designer tool
Pixlr is a family of photo editing applications that are quite easy to use. As one of the most amazing tools for web and graphic design people out there, Pixlr offers some amazing quick editing options. From resizing your files to cropping and reshaping them, you can do all that with ease using Pixlr. As a web designer if you are looking for a tool that offers basic functionality for using when you need to accomplish tasks quickly, Pixlr is just perfect! - JotForm
Jotform designer tool
Almost every interaction that takes a user from one point to another is realized by forms, and if you are a web designer, chances are you’ll be using forms in most of your pages. Having a well-designed form is important for the page and the overall layout, and it also improves the conversion rate. Well, you can use JotForm, which offers forms that are created in line with form design principles. They are quite easy to create and to have it embedded on your page. You can also connect your forms with other applications with over 30+ JotForm integrations - Bannersnack
Bannersnack designer tool for graphic designer
For times when you need a fast and straightforward, but professional graphic design tool, there is Bannersnack. With an easy to use drag and drop editor, and requiring no drawing or coding skills, this nifty tool makes design accessible to everyone. But don’t be fooled by the name—although they may have started as a banners maker back in 2008, Bannersnack has come a long way since then, transitioning into a cloud-based, collaborative graphic design platform. You can use it to create HTML5, GIFs, or AMPHTML ads and visuals, or even to manage remote design teams, replacing many other high-priced tools.
Whether you’re looking to create animated or static visuals for your next campaign or simplify your workflow, Bannersnack has many features that can help in this respect. From professional templates, design presents, and hand-crafted illustrations, all available at no resale price, or the capability of making up to 40 different-sized visuals simultaneously, this tool comes in handy to more experienced designers too, helping them save time and cut on costs.
23 Iconsout
iconsout
Iconscout is definitely the best resource for both free and premium design assets. It would be great for those who want to have access to multiple categories of design assets like icons, illustrations, 3d, Lottie animations in a single place.
You can create a free account to begin using Iconscout online directly in your web browser or you can also download the desktop app for your Mac or Windows device.
It provides a huge library of 3.1Million+ Icons, 45K+ Illustrations, 10K+ 3D Assets, 8.5k+ Lottie animations. With a stunning library of design assets contributed by designers and artists from all over the world they also provide integrated tools, plugins, and editors. This helps you with varieties of assets with enough functionality for necessary modifications.
- Renderforest
Renderforest
Renderforest is any marketing department’s dream. It is an all-in-one online branding platform where you can make logos, presentations, mockups, videos, and even websites. The best part about all this is that the templates are made by professional designers and all you have to do is customize. It’s amazing how a few design tools can come together and create exactly what you had in mind, sometimes even something better than you had envisioned.
The website easily addresses all your design needs and if you have any questions, the customer support team is always available.
- Sketch 3 – Graphic app
Sketch media designer tool
Sketch 3 has all the sets of nested symbols that will help create your best work. You can combine the symbols together to create reusable, flexible design with ease. There are number of features that are extremely useful for designers, like:
Artboards
Text and shared styles
Color picker
Pixel perfection
And many others
All in all, Sketch 3 is a great tool for designers to explore.
Conclusion
Remember, being a good designer is not just about having creative ideas and execution but also having the right equipment/tools. If you as a designer use a handful of tools, it will provide a solid foundation for communicating the ideas and simplifying the work. So, in the journey to move from a good designer to a great one, all you have to do is have a set of tools for web and graphic design professionals – and it will ensure that you are able to sail through the journey with minimum additional effort.
Conclusion
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