Productivity seems to have become the term-du-jour, especially during the recent economic crunch we’ve been experiencing globally. It’s no surprise companies have been trying to cut down workforce numbers and making those who didn’t loose their jobs up their productivity level during the same work hour period. This is also important for freelance graphic and web designers who run a one-person show and are responsible for pretty much everything, from designing to billing to customer service. We’ve compiled our favorite sites to make your life a little easier and your day a little bit more productive. Enjoy!
Colour Lovers and Adobe Kuler
www.colourlovers.com
http://kuler.adobe.com
Both Colour Lovers and Adobe Kuler are great sites that follow color trends for all types of creative endeavours. Colour Lovers offers palettes and patterns in downloadable files (Expression Design, WPF, XAML, ASE, PS, AI, GIMP, HTML, and ZIP). In Adobe Kuler you can play around with color values until you get the exact value you’re looking for. Web design has never been more colorful!
Colour Lovers
Adobe Kuler
Blind Text Generator
http://www.blindtextgenerator.com/
This handy page allows you to generate blocks of dummy text for web design layout visualization purposes. The menu on the left hand side of the page lets you choose the language for the dummy text, the number of words, characters, paragraphs, and font styles (including family, weight, letter spacing, height, decorations, alignment). The best part is that you can see the changes in real time inside the middle container.
Designers Tool Box
http://www.designerstoolbox.com
Designers Toolbox has a pretty impressive collection of very useful print and online tools. Print designers will get simple and straight forward answers to all of those nit-picky questions about envelope sizes, typical folders, DVD/CD covers and labels, and other print formats (postcards, binding styles, proofing marks, business card sizes, etc). Web designers have great resources available – web browser elements, web safe areas, banner sizes, iPhone GUI Elements, HTML characters (glyphs, accents, punctuation, numbers, money, math and much more).
SXC – Free Stock Photography
http://www.sxc.hu/
Owned by Getty Images and running on iStock backend technology, SXC is the ultimate free stock photography around. Great to have as a source of inspiration, or when you’re looking for that perfect image to complement your web design layout or just decorate your desktop.
Dafont
http://www.dafont.com
A constantly growing and high-quality collection of fonts and glyphs for all your graphic and web design needs. Conveniently divided in categories for your searching ease and with a special custom preview option so you can see what your text will actually look like in various font types.
Mail Chimp - Free Email Marketing
http://www.mailchimp.com
Email marketing can be a really useful tool, especially if you work on your own. Mail Chimp has taken out all the hassle (and monthly payments) of email campaigns. Although there are plans which start at $30, the best thing is the “Forever FREE” plan which allows up to 500 email subscribers and a limit of 3,000 emails a month. Not bad!
Browser Shots - Check Browser Compatibility
http://browsershots.org/
Web designers will probably go back to this page again and again. It makes screenshots of your site in every browser. The process is simple. You submit your site URL, it gets queued, several distributed computers make the screenshots, and they get uploaded to the site. You can even select which browsers and versions you want to see.
Type Tester- Compare Fonts Online
http://www.typetester.org/
This nifty type tool lets you cross-reference three different font types at once, with the same text. All you have to do is paste your text inside the text area, select font type and parameters for each option and you’re ready to go!
Icon Finder
http://www.iconfinder.net/
Icon Finder holds around 135,000 icons and 369 icon sets. There’s a special bar on the top, which allows you to select the background color, pixel size and license filter (for commercial and non-commercial use). Formats available are PNG and ICO, as well as various standard icon sizes.
Clean CSS
http://www.cleancss.com/
CleanCSS is another good resource for web designers. It formats and optimizes CSS so file sizes become smaller and the code is cleaner.
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