If you’re looking for free responsive web design tools, then you’ve come to the right place.
We’ve rounded up some of the best free responsive web design tools on the internet, so that you can save time and money while you’re building your site.
We know that it’s hard enough to build a website without having to pay for every little thing. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of free responsive web design tools that will help you create a beautiful, functional website without breaking the bank.
Free Responsive Web Design Tools
Responsive Web Design (RWD) while an easy to grasp a concept for most webmasters and devs today, still requires a concise understanding of the core functions that browsers use to render the responsive design for display, and ignoring those functions can lead to the development of badly coded responsive websites that will hinder user experience, and cause issues with website performance. Besides HTML5 which has helped to define the direction of responsive web design, developers also need a great understanding of CSS3 without which responsive design is simply not possible to accomplish. Media queries for example is the standalone solution for defining particular pieces of content for particular device screen sizes and types. But even then, that kind of functions touch only the very tip of the iceberg of everything that responsive design is capable of.
Mobile-friendly is another sensitive topic that will without a doubt reconstruct and reorganize how responsive design is perceived. There’s clear indication that mobile itself is moving towards a more specific approach of displaying content, which comes in the form of mobile applications and frameworks. All these growth concepts require a thorough investigation of the future of design, and how your current tactics can be modified for future growth.
With the understanding of where web design is headed, we’ve compiled a list of some truly practical and handy responsive web design tools that will fit just great into your existing toolkit, surely some of these will have already found their way to your heart, but some might be completely new to you. From direct front-end frameworks to mobile testing tools, and plenty of inspirational design pattern resources that will help you build better, more responsive, and more engaging websites from now on — grab a cup of tea and begin your excursion down this stellar roundup.
Bootstrap
bootstrap web design tool
Starting out with front-end website building has never been more convenient. Frameworks like Bootstrap make the process of bootstrapping a functional business website truly an effortless task. And since Bootstrap follows the latest web standards, all features are compatible with responsive design as well. What makes Bootstrap so successful is highly attributed to its vast collection of components, take the standard Bootstrap grid design and apply to it any of the free components to quickly bootstrap a modern website.
Components such as buttons that can be customized in shapes, colors and sizes, and navigation bars that you can yourself modify to integrate with custom JavaScript features. Browsers have also leaped very far into the future to support responsive design, for example — embedding videos or images can be configured to automatically resize in accordance to the device size that your visitors are accessing from. This makes the user experience modern, smooth, and reliable. In the big picture, Bootstrap is the framework that will help you with creating a website, then you can move forward with many of the other responsive design tools we will mention to further extend the experience.
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Webflow
webflow web design tool
Flexbox is perhaps the most talked-about feature of modern web design and development, and has spurred countless topics written by veteran developers in the last year alone. Flexbox’s basic definition — a robust layout tool that solves common issues found in responsive web design. What’s Webflow? It’s a platform that integrates Flexbox design into a visual builder, save hours of development and opt for an easy UI that you can build responsive layouts with.
So anyway.. Why Flexbox? Part of the reason why Flexbox is so popular, is that it solves complex design issues that would otherwise require unproductive design patterns. To give you the basic rundown of Flexbox — you can effectively create complex design patterns with only a few lines of code. For example, creating equally aligned modal elements that continue to remain aligned despite the font sizes that you use for headlines, or sub-headlines. With Flexbox you can create layouts like feature outlines, or customer reviews and align them so that they provide a remarkable user experience. Even mundane things like pricing tables that you relied on native CSS3 to help you outline, can now be integrated in your designs using Webflow’s Flexbox features. Full-on website grids can be built to accelerate the speed at which a website comes into fruition.
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UIPatterns
uipatterns web design tool
As a web designer, there’s no escaping the UI patterns that govern so many of the websites, apps, and tools that we use on daily basis. Just imagine what the digital world would look like if we didn’t rely on common UI patterns. It would be one crazy, distorted world. But, thanks to evolution of design, and the understanding of how patterns repeat themselves in common functionality, it’s possible to learn about the different UI patterns that rule categories like forms, data management, content management, layout, navigation, and user screen pages.
It’s a vast array of design screens that can be recreated using your own design style, but following the guidance of common UI patterns to achieve a sense of balance. And those are also the categories that UI Patterns covers. Each category has a number of sample patterns that display the way each design category can be modified to reflect standard UI patterns, all of whom have been found to be most favorable by the average digital user. The design patterns that you’ll find on this page can be applied to native, and mobile applications. Responsive design was all about usability right from the start, managing a single layout for multiple devices is a heavy task on its own, but patterns help to even out the problematic tasks by letting you apply a single pattern to multiple designs.
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Imagify
imagify web design tool
Images is another highly favorable topic in responsive design. After all, you wouldn’t want to be serving the same exact image to visitors who comes from tablet devices, or from their smartphones. The device resolution is always going to be different, and while CSS3 features exist to maintain some sort of balance between the image sizes and types that different devices are downloading, improving image quality and their size is still a very strong topic. Sure, HTTP/2 is going to bring forth some great changes for developers worldwide, but the next 5 years are still going to be fairly tough for the web.
HTTP Archive reports that in 2010 — on average, the size of a single web page was roughly 700kb, whereas in 2016 — that number has grown to 2.2mb! And majority of those megabytes is taken up by visual content; images. So.. you have to ask yourself, am I compromising the performance of my pages due to irresponsible decisions in terms of image optimization? That’s where you can learn about Imagify, a service/platform that sort of wants to answer that question for you, and give you the right tools to get on with image optimization, as a fully automated process.
A WordPress plugin is made available so that you can optimize all your existing and future uploads on the fly. Unless you directly look into the problem, it can often seem like it’s not a problem at all, but if corporations like Google encourage users to improve their website performance in exchange for better rankings.. you know that there’s no going back from that.
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JsTips
jstips web design tool
JavaScript is frequently being used in front-end development. Think of frameworks like React, Angular, Meteor, Node.js, and native JavaScript libraries that pretty much plug together the rest of the web. jQuery is the one library that you’ll be using fairly frequently if you’re all about fancy responsive design features, and the only way to get better at JS is by writing more code. In this case, tips can be awfully helpful to learn new things, to understand patterns better, and to generally keep your brain fresh and afloat with the latest happenings in JavaScript. So.. install JsTips on your smartphone.
A simple and elegant application that will deliver you a new JavaScript tip on daily basis. Sometimes, the tips will talk about stuff that you already know at the back of your mind, but more often than not — you’ll run into stuff that’s creative, futuristic, and plain exciting to try and work with. The one review on the App Store suggests that the app is lacking some basic design functionality, but as a coder — you get what you crave the most, the meaty bits of code examples and code definition so that you can jump on that code editor and plug away.
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The Data Visualisation Catalogue
the data visualisation catalogue web design tool
The thing with responsive design is, you can work all day and night on perfecting the layout you’re after, but even after the layout is done — there’s more work to be done, and that usually comes down to the way that you can integrate interactive and dynamic content into your designs. Sure, WordPress made it easy to plug-up the content with exciting plugins that somewhat cater to the responsive device, but truly native responsive websites are a much tougher cookie to crack, and one of the things you find in content the most is charts, graphs, and other data visualizations that depict the story through numbers. New York Times is a great example of how a responsive websites will need a responsive set of tools to create dynamic visualizations for the latest election results.
That’s why we’re sharing more about The Data Visualization Catalogue — a wonderful collection of data visualization patterns and functions that each have a unique page, a unique description, a preview of what the chart/graph/visualization is going to look like, and most importantly — a recommendation of the most stable latest tools that can be used to recreate such a diagram, or visualization. A lot of work has gone into this project, and it would be a fairly ignorant idea to avoid using this to help yourself understand responsive data visualization better. There is a great deal of examples available, such as — arc diagrams, area graphs, bar charts, brainstorm clouds, bubble charts and maps, bulletin graphs, calendars, connection maps, flow maps, histograms, line graphs, spiral plots and countless other creative ways to display your data, on a responsive website.
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Craft by InVision LABS
craft by invision labs web design tool
Craft is a new tool from InVision Labs, a prominent and highly reputable design software platform that has helped to shape the landscape of web design for many years already. With the release of Craft, it seems that InVision wants to keep that record intact, and they most likely will. Craft is a screen design tool like no other. It’s intuitive, it’s intelligent, it can accomplish difficult tasks, and it’s very responsive to the needs of the user.
Create dynamic application prototypes that use real data (either provided by you, or custom generated) to create a unique app prototype experience. The library feature is capable of adding new and exciting design elements to your screens through cloud functionality, so whether you want to pull data from a live website, or upload it on your own — Craft Library is the feature to use. It’s unlikely we will see a competitor to such a system any time soon, so learning Craft right now could mean that you’d be more adapted to the new features it plans to release in the future.
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Boxy SVG Editor
boxy svg editor web design tool
Boxy is a new kind of way to manipulate vector graphics directly in the browser. Up until now, graphic designers were heavily dependent on using tools like Sketch, and Adobe Illustrator to conclude common tasks focused around vector graphics, but with Boxy SVG — you can now create illustrations, icons, banners, mockups, charts, buttons and other custom SVG elements directly from your favorite browser. It’s astonishingly functional, and certainly useful. SVG’s are already the future of responsive designs, and tools like Boxy will ensure that it stays that way. The benefits of integrating SVG graphics into your designs are invaluable. They’re impeccably useful for performance, scalability, and beautiful user experience.
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UXPin
uxpin web design tool
If you have an idea for web design, you can realize it with the amazing and flexible UXPin. It is a solution that does not really know any limitations. As a matter of fact, your imagination is the only boundary that you have, so let loose and create the exact masterpiece that you are after. With UXPin, you can make simple and complicated things a reality sooner rather than later.
Whether you are setting up a prototype or a full-blown project, again, there are no boundaries for UXPin, as you can utilize it for whatever.
As for the features, needless to say, there are very many. From built-in libraries, like Material Design and Bootstrap, to HTML import, tons of components, interactive form elements and vector drawing tools, all this and heaps more is what you get with UXPin. Get ready for an immediate difference with the impressive UXPin now.
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Mobile-Friendly Test (by Google)
mobile-friendly test by google web design tool
In this day and age, it is of utmost importance that your website or blog is fully compatible with all devices. In short, your page must be mobile-ready. If you are interested in checking out the flexibility of your site, you better not miss trying Google’s very own Mobile-Friendly Test. While it comes part of the Search Console, you can also test things out even if you do not have an account.
To examine how fluid the layout of your website or blog is, you either add your URL or even code. Once you hit the test button, Mobile-Friendly Test will take care of all the rest. After it analyzes the page, Mobile-Friendly Test will then provide the result, as well as if there are any errors and whatnot.
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CrossBrowserTesting
crossbrowsertesting web design tool
Similarly to testing your website for mobile devices, you need to see how compatible it is with different web browsers. To your luck, instead of doing everything manually, you can benefit from CrossBrowserTesting. With numerous desktop and mobile browsers, the software will help you out on making your page optimized for all the well-liked browsers. To get the gist of it, you can even watch the available presentations and see all that is possible with the remarkable CrossBrowserTesting.
The tool comes in three different packages, making sure web developers and teams find the right solution for their needs. Keep in mind, you can start a risk-free trial and experience this powerful solution first-hand. Some of the features contain manual and auto testing, debugging, screenshots, real devices, parallel testing and CI integrations, to name a few.
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Origami
origami page builder
We won’t hide the fact that quite a few of these tools, are in fact for prototyping design interfaces, and in particular user interfaces. It just seems that the door to the market has opened in the last few years, and now companies like Google and Facebook are following suit to cater to the needs of professional graphics designers. Origami is a design prototyping library that’s built by Facebook.
Origami has already seen use in popular platforms like Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, and now anyone with access to their development toolkit will have the option to recreate some of those famous interface patterns using Origami. The modern components is what makes Origami’s back-end so favorable. Scrolling, swiping, and tapping elements have all been carefully designed and crafted to reflect the possibilities of state of the art technology. Origami, as a native application, will let you import your Sketch designs directly into Origami so that you can preview what your designs would look like live in the browser. And yes, Origami works for desktop prototyping as well. In many ways — it is a universal tool.
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Microsoft Flow
microsoft web design tool
With Microsoft Flow we’re stepping into a more enterprise-level design development. Flow is for building workflows that can automatically do several tasks on behalf of your own development process. Why would this be useful in design? Well, for one, it helps with synchronizing data across many devices. Second,it has a neat notifications system that you can use to setup alerts and more. This way, your team, and your bottom line remains intact when it comes to being up to speed with what is happening across the overall design structure.
What makes Flow so appealing as well, is the amount of services that it can connect to — Twitter, Dropbox, Slack, GitHub, Google Drive, to name a few. There are more than 30 readily available service integrations from the time of writing this. And that’s not it either. The custom templates will help to explain how Flow can become a useful addition to your existing design workflow, or development — we won’t judge. Each template is designed for a specific purpose such as sending you a text message when your boss emails you, adding Twitter leads to CRM, or backing up your files. These templates are just the tip of the iceberg and are intended to inspire you to create flows that are customized to the exact processes that you need.
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1140 Grid
1140 grid web design tool
Mobile-only developers won’t like to admit it, but desktop-first approach is still the best way of scaling down a design to be suitable for different device types. The developers built 1140 responsive grids for screens that are 1280px in width, with the capability to gracefully downgrade for tinier screens. Unfortunately, the original website is now defunct, but all available open-source files are still on GitHub, and some documentation is available to help you with building your first CSS grid website.
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Adaptive Images
adaptive images web design tool
We already learned quite a few things about responsive images; the most important of which was the fact that images need to be optimized for all device types, and minified to provide the best possible user experience, without the expense of website performance. Just think of how much faster the web would be if every single website started to deliver performance-optimized visual content to its visitors?
The overall web traffic would drop by a staggering amount, but unless this is going to be enforced natively, we won’t see a change like this happening for a long time still. However, alternatives exist. One of which, is Adaptive Images. The Adaptive Images algorithm is capable of detecting the type of a device that a user is accessing your pages with, and deliver to that user a more specifically crafted image that would respond to the requirements of a device that’s much smaller in screen size. Adaptive Images stands out because it integrates with popular content management systems seamlessly, without causing pages to break. So in essence, there aren’t many reasons NOT to use Adaptive Images.
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FitVids
fitvids web design tool
Media (files, photos, music, videos, etc,) is what slows the web down the most. We haven’t unfortunately learned how to manage vast amounts of data to provide the user a browsing experience that would reflect minimalistic functionality. Bandwidth isn’t free, yet. And it certainly can be expensive in developing countries. Chris Coyier, who runs CSS-Tricks, didn’t think twice when he decided to give back to the developer community, with FitVids — a fluid jQuery library for doing seamless video embedding in your responsive websites. It’s so crucial to deliver these point to point experiences for users. That way, they may never question the quality of the platform that they’re browsing.
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Wirefy
wirefy web design tool
Wirefy fills the role of going from a design sketch, to a full prototype implementation. To achieve desired result, there needs to be a way of putting together UI elements quickly. That’s where Wirefy fits in the best. Wirefy is the layer that you can build on top of. Take the layout, and manage per your own requirements. Be it removing components, or managing the style capabilities. Needless to mention, building a prototype that a client can actually interact with, is going to give you a reasonable amount of “extra points” for the effort.
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FitText
fittext web design tool
Text or typography if you like plays a huge role in responsive designs. First, you have to get the layout right, but you can’t forget about aligning your typography. This will reflect the same qualities over all devices and mediums that access your content. Similar to FitVids, this is where FitText comes in. It’s a simple jQuery library for scaling your headlines that will match the size of a parent element. This way, your important headlines will always remain in the spotlight, fully aligned through modern standards of web design.
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Responsinator
responsinator web design tool
Long have gone the days when you had to check the compatibility of a website design through multiple physical devices. Indeed, such times existed. But due to software evolution, now you can check the responsiveness of a website on a large set of devices. You can do this by just entering your website URL into a tool such as Responsinator. It’s truly a remarkable feat of design technology, and will save you tons of time in design process. Now you can load up your website and have it tested against the most popular and modern smart devices. Now, you will be able see if at any point, you can do improvements to your site.
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Responsive web design tools for front-end developers
How was that for a good refresh of memory and understanding? We covered some really jaw-dropping tools, yet the market for responsive design tools is growing with time. Sometimes it’s not just about the tools that gives us direct code tips, or a framework to work with. The tools that inspire us to make our apps and website more responsive where design is truly concerned. User experience always comes first, and there’s no better way to improve user experience than by improving the user interface. This is the very thing that becomes the experience of what you’re building. Have you found some new ideas from this list? We’d love to have you share them with us, always inspiring to read what others are coming up with!
free web design tools
There are plenty of free tools and resources to help with your website design, whether you’re looking for a little flare or you want to build a new site from scratch.
Here is a list of free website design tools and resources. There are helpful design apps, platforms to create full sites, and resources for font, icon, and image freebies.
Design Resources
Adobe Color CC. Adobe Color is a free online app to try out, create, and save color schemes, each in five variations.
Adobe Color CC.
Google Fonts. Google Fonts is a quick and easy way to find and add quality fonts. With hundreds of free, open-source fonts available, browse and compare font families, then simply grab the code to add to your collection.
WhatFont. WhatFont is a useful extension to identify fonts. On any web page, just click your WhatFont button to find out.
Type Genius. Type Genius is a simple web app to find nice font combinations. Just select a start font, and instantly get a suggestion for a complementary font pairing.
Type Genius.
Iconfinder. Iconfinder is an icon search engine to search through 900,000 icons. Browse both premium and 100,00 free icons.
Vectr. Vectr is a free design app for web and desktop to create vector graphics. Share Vectr document URLs for visual feedback. Annotate an image, and share changes in real-time.
Unsplash. Unsplash in a website for free dynamic images. No stock photos here, you are free to modify and distribute the images all you want. The site posts 10 handpicked photos every 10 days. It also has a gallery of example websites that have used the images.
Unsplash.
Stock Up. Stock Up is a search engine that aggregates stock photos from 26 different free stock photo websites. The site currently indexes over 13,000 free images.
Lost and Taken. Lost and Taken is a design blog that provides free texture images. The site has textures from a wide variety of categories, including film, smoke, paper, watercolor, paint, plaster, light, smoke, motion blur, and nature.
TextureKing. TextureKing posts free stock textures to enhance your design. With hundreds of free textures available, the site includes textures from concrete, wood, fabrics, liquids, dirt, glass, and metals.
TextureKing.
Design and Development Tools
Skitch. Skitch is an application from Evernote to visually communicate ideas, share feedback, and collaborate. Clip from anywhere on the web. Make your point with shapes, arrows, and quick sketches. Use Skitch on your desktop, tablet, and phone to give feedback and share ideas. Basic plan is free. Paid plans start at $24.99 per year.
Canva. Canva is an online graphic design platform. Non-designers can easily create graphic designs and layouts with drag-and-drop features. Design with free stock photos, icons, and shapes. Create menus, banners, social media graphics, and more. Canva’s basic platform is free. Premium elements are never more than $1.
Canna.
Pixlr. Pixlr is a free photo editor from Autodesk to enhance images with free effects, overlays, and filters. Choose from a pool of effect packs to give your image the look you want. Stylize images to look like a pencil drawing, ink sketch, poster, and more. Use the Editor, O Matic, and Touch Up web apps to create stunning images.
Google Web Designer. Google Web Designer is an advanced web app that lets you design and build HTML5 web content. Create using drawing tools, text, and 3D objects. Animate objects and events on a timeline. Add image galleries, videos, maps, and more.
Webflow. Webflow is an all-in-one design platform to create responsive websites. Start with a blank canvas for total creative control, or pick a template to get started fast. Drag and drop to build animated and interactive design without writing code. One project is free. Premium plans start at $16 per month.
Webflow.
Themify Flow. Themify Flow is a framework to build responsive themes within WordPress. Simply drop in the layout modules, and configure the options. Style everything with a live preview of the design. It comes with Google Fonts, color picker, image upload, and more.
Mobirise. Mobirise is an app to create small and medium websites, landing pages, promo sites for products and services, and more. Drop the blocks you like into your page, edit content in-line, and publish. Choose from a large selection of pre-made blocks, such as content slider, responsive image gallery, and video background.
Marvel. Marvel is a web app to design interactive prototypes. Design in your browser or add images using Photoshop, Sketch on pen and paper. Turn your designs into interactive mobile and web prototypes in just a few clicks. Import your team from Slack and Asana. Free with commenting on three projects. Paid plan starts at $15 per month.
Bootstrap. Bootstrap is an open-source, front-end framework for creating websites and web applications. Bootstrap comes with dozens of custom HTML and CSS components, and templates for forms, buttons, typography, and more.
Conclusion
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