Top Five Web Design Tools I Can’t Live Without
January 26th, 2009Inspired by Adam Darowski’s Top 10 CSS tricks, here are my top five design tools I can’t live without. Hope you find it useful!
5. Firebug
Great for resolving problems in the DOM, Firebug lets you tinker in realtime under the hood and figure out what is actually going on. Not perfect, and prone to sometimes head scratching behavior, but still a great resource.
4. Parallels / Multiple Versions of IE
Not exactly a true design tool, but an extremely useful setup for anyone who wrestles with Internet Explorer’s hair-pulling interpretations of CSS. Traditionally a thorny issue – how to test multiple versions of IE, without having multiple Windows computers or Windows virtual machines running for each version, this wonderful bit of hackery makes it simple. Hopefully this will be updated when IE 8 comes around…
3. Web Developer Toolbar / HTML Tidy Firefox plugins
These two are a bit of a gimme, but still worth mentioning if you still for some reason haven’t tried them out. Great for quickly figuring out exactly what you’ve missed with your markup and CSS.
2. Art Director’s Toolkit
If it were only for it’s eye dropper tool, Code Line’s Art Director’s Toolkit would still be indispensable. It’s eye dropper grabs color values for anything on screen and provides both RGB and most importantly, hex values, creates easy cut and paste of those values to the design app of your choice, and even lets you store colors in a handy pull-out drawer for use later, or in compiling a color palate of multiple swatches.
Add to that a full library of Pantone colors, color blend tools, an on screen ruler (great for measuring CSS layout issues) and a great tool for measuring out page layouts, and you have a tool that becomes indispensable once you start using it. It’s small, lightweight, and a truly elegant Mac application that every designer should check out.
1. Everyone Else.
This is rather corny, but Web design does not happen in a vacuum, nor is it anything like as mature as other mediums, such as print or video, film or television. As such, if we don’t constantly absorb everything that is being done around us (while still being careful to judge it’s respective merits), we fall behind. With that said, anyone who does not rely on a good RSS aggregator, bookmarking tools, note taking software and the like is missing out. That, or your head is just able to hold more information than mine can. If so kudos to you, if not, try Magnolia, NetNewsWire and Evernote.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)
January 26th, 2009 at 11:48 am
I use Firebug daily. It definitely deserves #1. I think I uninstalled the Art Director’s Toolkit. I’ll have to give it another try.
Cheers!
January 26th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Ah, Firebug. That might have to be #1 for me.
To keep with the “Fire” theme, I’m in love with Fireworks for any web image editing. Never ever use PhotoShop.
Also, made the switch from Parallels to VMware. Much better, but let’s face it… still a pain in the ass.
Okay, so my list is probably:
5. VMware/IE Developer Toolbar
4. Web Developer Toolbar
3. Fireworks
2. Firebug
1. Everyone else (copying you!!!)
Also, falling in love with Coda, so that may shoot up the list soon…
January 26th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
I’m intrigued by your love for Fireworks – haven’t really used it in a long time, but now I’m thinking I should take a second look.
February 1st, 2009 at 1:38 am
I wrote it all up a while ago, for the many times people ask what I like about Fireworks.
http://www.darowski.com/tracesofinspiration/2008/04/29/why-i-love-fireworks/