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5 Sites A Web Designer Couldn’t Do Without

Over the past few years of being a self-taught web designer, the number of tools and apps available to designers & devs have gone through the roof.

Here I’ll outline a number of tools available which we use on a daily basis here at MeeCreative. I hope that you may find some tools relevant to your design and development process.

Perhaps the largest source of icons in the world

Flaticon is perhaps my favourite place to find & use icons on the web. Created by freepik, Flaticon was built purposely to help designers and developers. With the community regularly adding new icons, this website has been constantly improving since launch. Features such as the ability to export to SVG or web font will give any developer an appreciation for this site. P.s. they offer a free extension for all you Adobe addicts.

Image Compression that Works!

My second choice is TinyPNG, it’s awesome for designers and developers who have an appreciation for compression and faster load times on websites. Using Photoshop or Illustrator to export to png will mean that no compression is used to flatten these files for web, so what you’re left with is an illustration with a massive file size which isn’t very practical.

Update: They’ve also recently implemented a WordPress plugin which offers PNG and JPG compression on site through use of their API.

Just Placehold it!

Placehold.it is a great tool for adding placeholders to a website as a temporary measure before adding images. Its easy to use, quick to load and very effective to customise (all you’re required to do is change the text in your browsers address bar for a different image).

Images to freely use Commercially

Unsplash.com has nice set of professional images which are all licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) meaning you can do whatever you like with the images. We’ve used a number of these images across a number of our sites as they’re all great quality and don’t feel ‘stocky’.

Minify

Minify JavaScript simply says what it does on the tin, it’s a free online JavaScript compressor. For those who don’t use a CSS or Javascript minifier, should certainly consider using for a myriad of reasons particularly being faster load time and less client-side bandwidth used.

Summary

In short, the amount of tools online are endless, the ones described above are a few of our all-time favourites. Flaticon has a great repository available, but its limited to the how bespoke you require it to be, in short you’ll need a designer – say, from the Gainesville web design agency, if you’re working on a project that needs some personality and that extra bit of pizzazz. Placeholdit is a nifty tool but don’t forget it should only be used as a temporary measure to relevant imagery, its also worth noting its not for everyone as some users find it difficult to visaualise images when in ‘placeholder mode’. If you have any resources to share, feel free to comment or by emailing us directly.

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