Amazing list of tools for designers

Whether you’re a freelancer or a designer, it’s always good to have a stack of resources for business, file storage, stock, fonts and many other things. This article by Steven Snell from Design Mag has a great loooooong list of more than 200 amazing resources. Although I think this is a GREAT list, there are a few items I would for sure add to this list. Here are just a few of these.

Dropbox for file storage. For me dropbox is a must have!

I love that they have Coda listed as the number one tool for code editing. There are of course so many you could add to this list but this is my top choice too! And another one I’d high five Steve for would be listing WordPress as the top CMS. 😀

I would for sure list iCal as one of my favorite time managers, as it syncs from my macbook to my iPhone etc.
The font list is missing a few of my favorites – for web designers I still think fontsquirrel.com is a great tool. The generator and demo pages are great for my students who are just learning to embed or attach fonts to their website with @font-face. Font Dragr is a tool you can use to test custom fonts in the browser. No coding, no uploading, just drag and drop!
Fontfonter is a tool you can use to swap out fonts on current online websites to see what they’d look like in a new font.
I love typography of course is another lovely site for any designer for inspiration.

For code tools I would add this as a handy resource – caniuse.com

Another great code tool for CSS3 is css3please.com, I love the interactivity that it generates right in the browser.

For the graphic design section – as a designer I’d have to say I mostly disagree – Photoshop is great but there are so many more programs you would need to know to be a professional graphic designer. A starting point would be making sure you know all of Creative Suite’s software. But that’s a starting point…

I think they’re missing a few golden resources for CSS galleries such as www.awwwards.com. I know there are far too many great galleries to list but this is one of my go-to websites for inspiration for sure.

 

 

1 Comments

  1. Rick Gladwin Sep 03, 2012 - 09:30 PM

    I agree about the need to expand beyond Photoshop. Especially with the mix of screen resolutions out there and the associated upswing in SVG graphics. Designers will need to know how to build vector graphics for the web.