A web designer is always looking at making things simple and interactive for the online consumers. Whether it is a simple corporate website or a complex eCommerce store, the web designer’s work is to make it look appealing, and help increase your sales with effective design and excellent interface.
From sketching your website to actually designing the layout, each task is equally important to boost your business. To help ease the burden of these tasks, you have various tools. Each web designer has their set of favorite tools that are brought out when they are tasked with a website project.
Here we will take you through a list of 12 such web design tools that you need to familiarize yourselves with for best-in-class designs and layouts.
Atomic
This tools works on both PCs and Macs, and allows you to create interesting design impressions on the browser tool itself. The end design can be shared across a range of devices. Excellent tool when you have to showcase your wireframes or prototypes to the clients for approval.
You can import designs from Photoshop and Sketch to this browser tool for better outputs. Adding interactive elements with this tool is pretty easy. Sharing and receiving feedback is pretty interactive with this tool, making it the best collaborative tool for web designers. You simply cannot miss out on this tool when you want to showcase your work to the clients, and connect with them.
Visual Studio Code
Is coding making your life difficult? You simply cannot ignore this tool if you want to get your website launched quickly. This is a source code editor that supports debugging, has embedded Git control and code refactoring that allows users to easily change themes, shortcuts and preferences.
The intellisense a part of this code editor offers smart completions that are dependent on variable types, function definitions and imported modules. You can launch it or associate it with your existing apps, making editing an easy function.
Avocode
This is the ideal tool if you are aiming at collaborating the designers with the developers. You can easily export the designs from Photoshop and Sketch to Avocode, while keeping the elements and layers in the original tool intact. Sending work to the backend coders without causing any disturbance in the design has been made easy with this tool. Collaboration with this tool saves a lot of time and effort that is invested in sending a design back and forth between the frontend designers and backend developers. This tools works with OS X, Linux and Windows.
Staticman
How would you feel when user-generated content on your website gets transformed into data files that can be stored with GitHub repository, just like the rest of the content on your website? This is usually needed for sites that have always been using third-party services for basic commenting systems. With Staticman, you can stay assured on this. This tool will not only convert your static content into data, but also keep it in a single place, everything including the content, markup and styles. With a request for approval, you can always moderate the entries before they are actually published.
Zeplin
This is the ideal tool for the stage when you are done with designing, and are aiming towards development. It helps the designers and developers interact with each other. Implementation of designs is done with utmost perfection with this tool in hand, as it reduces the meeting times and helps increase the value of communication. This tool makes layout, alignment and referencing easy and hasslefree.
StyleGuide
For a designer, creating and maintaining the styleguides to make the website more appealing is an extensive job. This is why styleguide makes their life easy. You can copy your project’s CSS to styleguide’s CSS to maintain the layout and style that you have already incorporated. Adding Styleguide to a separate folder and using it as CSS can also make your life easy as a designer. Now, just make changes to the StyleGuide and the changes can be seen on your website.
Form
If you want to make sure your website tops the material design trend, then you should be using this tool. It is available for free, and is a value addition to your prototyping kit.
Using this tool, you can easily create prototypes irrespective of the type of device on which it would be viewed. You can add interactive and animation effects to give a better idea on what you are producing to your clients. This tool is definitely a must-have for your website.
Macaw
This code-based web design tool helps you design prototypes, mock-ups and wireframes within minutes for client approval. The interface is apt for designers, and is pretty user friendly.
While you are designing with this tool, you will see that it creates HTML and CSS in the background. This tool helps create demos for the end user, and helps create effective responsive designs that can help the clients understand how the layout will appear and work.
Marvel
This is an excellent prototyping and collaborative tool, which does not use any sort of coding. This tool allows you to use timers to handle the transition between pages, thus making it smooth. Mockups can be created with the effects for any device with this tool.
Origami
This is a tool that allows you to design and build excellent products with ease. Some of the best tools that Facebook has created including Instagram and Messenger have been an outcome of this tool. This is a tool devised by Facebook and works for Mac and iOS only. It allows you to integrate sketch, thus allowing you to import designs easily. Worflow management is made easy with this tool.
These top tools should be a part of the web designer’s everyday life, so as to make designing and collaboration easy and hassle-free. With the mobile-first approach gaining importance, it is time for designers to think omni-channel when coming up with layouts for the websites.
Semaphore Software has aced the mobile-first approach with responsive and highly interactive websites. As a responsive web development company, we have a collaborative environment for the designers and developers, thus aspiring quick launch of websites. Connect with us at info@semaphore-software.com to convert your ideas into excellent website solutions.
