Responsive web design is the practice of creating websites that adapt to different screen sizes. It’s important to have, because it allows you to make use of all the available space on a device.
Responsive web design tools can help you create responsive websites more easily, by providing you with pre-built templates and tools to get started quickly. In this article, we’ll show you how to download free responsive web design tools.
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Responsive Web Design Tools Free Download
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
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.Download
Webflow
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.Download
UIPatterns
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.Download
Imagify
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.Download
JsTips
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.Download
The Data Visualisation Catalogue
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.Download
Craft by InVision LABS
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.Download
Boxy SVG Editor
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.Download
UXPin
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.Download
Mobile-Friendly Test (by Google)
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.Download
CrossBrowserTesting
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.Download
Origami
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.Download
Microsoft Flow
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.Download
1140 Grid
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.Download
Adaptive Images
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.
web designing tools for beginners
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. Advertisement
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.
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.”
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
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.Advertisementhttps://82cc693822576e7d969ae3e4494ce5f2.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
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.”
06. Affinity Designer
“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.”Advertisementhttps://82cc693822576e7d969ae3e4494ce5f2.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
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
07. 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.
08. Proto.io
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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.
09. Balsamiq
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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.
10. 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.
Conclusion
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