10 Tools and Resources Web Designers Can Not Live Without

Becoming a graphic designer does not mean you need to be a starving artist. It is a career that enables you to show your artistic side and get a good paycheck in return. Whether you are an independent designer, or working with a company, or land a job at a creative agency, it takes more than designing skills to establish a flourishing career in designing.

 

If you are planning to try your hands at graphic designing or considering it a potential career, you definitely need to invest in few of the best tools that you would certainly need. We have compiled a list of best and resourceful designing tools that would help you streamline your work and express your artistic side.

 

1. Adobe Creative Cloud

InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop have always been web designers best buddies that allow them to turn their ideas into a beautiful art piece. Adobe Creative Cloud is an annual service  offered by AdobeSystems that offers a collection of different software such as photography tools, web development tools, video editing, graphic designing and so much more. With this software, you can download a whole new bunch of creative tools.

 

2. CodeKit

CodeKit is another popular designing tool that enables you to design sites and logo blazing fast. The tool does Coffeescript, Markdown, Haml, Less and Sass for you and removes the barrier between programming and you. Though the tool is available for the different operating system today, it was originally designed for Mac operating system.

 

3. The Noun Project

The Noun Project celebrates the world’s visual language by offering a wide range of icons for sharing and creating. As a matter of fact, icons have become a new language of web users and plays a crucial role in marketing and media business. The tool introduces you to hundreds of icons that can indeed help you to make the most of the iconography.

 

4. Foundation

Foundation is one of the most advanced responsive front-end frameworks that helps you design services, apps, and products way quicker. Foundation is absolutely free to use and also comes with various tutorials to assist you while designing. Foundation framework is highly customizable, flexible, readable, and semantic.

 

5. Adobe Color CC

Adobe Color CC, as the name suggests, allows you to browse hundreds of thousands of colors, schemes, patterns, and color themes. Adobe Color CC is highly responsive and lets you access it from your Android, iPad or iPhone devices. When you use Adobe Color CC tool  to use, it automatically saves your chosen color themes to Creative Cloud Libraries to help you access them from mobile apps and desktop. Adobe Color CC certainly has the right combination of color themes for your ever designing needs.

 

6. InVision

InVision is yet another free designing tool that transforms your ideas into working prototypes. InVision comes with a community which encourages users to post feedback on your designs. You can upload your designs and embed it with transitions, gestures, and animations to change your static designs into interactive and clickable prototypes. Bring your ideas to life with InVision!

 

7. FontShop

Fonts are considered to be the life of the designs, especially when designing logos. FontShop is a great tool to choose the most suitable font for your designer from a huge collection of different fonts. FontShop has an extremely cool website that boasts of new font type releases to help you stay up-to-date with the latest font releases.

 

8. DigitalArts

If you are looking for some inspiration to inspire your next project, then DigitalArts is your place to be. DigitalArts offers a wide range of design tutorials and is a one-stop shop for your design learning needs. They have with them, hundreds of thousands of tutorials on almost every design skill you may be looking for. From latest design software releases to various new techniques, DigitalArts certainly has something for every designer.

 

9. Pixlr

If you have been working as web designer for quite some time, you must be familiar with Pixlr tool. Pixlr is an online photo editing tool that lets you try new designs and techniques for free. They have an array of editing options such as blend modes, effects, overlays, and borders. It is available for desktop users, Mobile users as well as in the form of web apps. So, no matter how and where you are comfortable designing your next project, Pixlr is there to help you. Moreover, Pixlr is so easy to use that a non-designer can also build beautiful photos and designs within few minutes.

 

10. Dribbble

Dribble is a popular platform to showcase your skills in the form of your designs and images. Dribbble enables you to upload your piece of design for others to browse and appreciate. Dribbble is much more than just a community of creative designers and artists to share their work of art with each other. The website also comes with a wide range of color schemes to choose from to view projects in any chosen color scheme.

 

There are a variety of designing tools available on the internet today, thanks to the ever-growing popularity of web designing needs. Therefore, we have picked some of the most important and most preferred tools to help you streamline your designing process.

 

Check out our list of tools and don’t forget to share your go-to design tools with our readers.

 

Author Bio:

Emily is a WordPress Developer by profession and writer by hobby. She works for Wordsuccor Ltd., and helps in building Custom WordPress Design for creative entrepreneurs. She already have numerous web design related articles under her name.