Design Tools

Updated: June 21, 2006

Here’s a growing list of tools I find helpful when designing.

Business Tools

Basecamp lets you avoid the chaos of back-and-forth emailing with clients through dead simple project management.
Blinksale seems to indeed be the easiest way to send invoices online. And with such a bright interface, it even makes it fun.

“Anatomy of an Icon” is an article I turn to again and again when I sit down to push those individual little pixels.
“Freelancipation” has some great advice for those wanting to go solo in their design work.
“CMYK (for Those Who Do RGB)” is a great primer for us web designers trying to learn the ins and outs of print design.

The Color Schemer Gallery is by far my favorite source for great color schemes. The only thing better than the gallery is Color Schemer Studio, the best color-picking program I’ve used.
ColourLovers has a lot of really nice pre-made color schemes. Browse through and pick one you like.
ColorToy is a very nice flash-based color selection tool that gives you four color choices based on the color you choose. Also has a random generate function.
The Color Palette Generator lets you upload your own photos and then it generats a color scheme based on that photo. Really quite amazing.
ColorMatch is a great one for picking color schemes. Only works in Internet Explorer.
The web-safe color palette is dead. Learn about the web-smart palette at moreCrayons.

Authentic Boredom by Cameron Moll is a constant source of great design tips and tricks. I have learned a lot from reading his site.
CSS Beauty is a great design showcase that seems to be the most frequently updated. My personal favorite.
Stylegala is not only great for inspiration, it also has a good list of design resources. One of my favorites.
What CSS Import lacks in quality, it makes up for in quantity. (Of course, I’m a little biased since I've been listed there.)
The CSS Zen Garden is a unique site that lets you pick the look of the site. It really is an amazing demonstration of what can be accomplished through CSS-based design.
The CSS Vault has a great collection of CSS-based sites.
Sites are featured weekly and awards are given monthly at the Web Standards Awards.

iStockphoto.com has great stock photos for very little money. I’ve used their images in several projects and I’ve been very pleased every time.
Stock.XCHNG also has stock photos, but they’re free (though selection’s not as big).

Forty Internet HTML Tutorial is a well-designed easy-to-read introduction to the ins and outs of HTML.
Though not as well layed out as the above HTML tutorial, CSS Basics is a good place to start learning CSS if you don’t want to buy a book. If you want to do web design today, you can’t afford to not know CSS.
Ever wanted to know how to design a good form? This article gives a good primer on the what-tos and the what-not-to-dos of form layouts. See the WaSP’s article on coding Accessible Forms for the how-tos.
Design those nice forms mentioned above without knowing the how-tos thanks to The Form Assembly. This site makes it a snap to create some of the best forms I’ve seen. The only thing worse than filling out an online form is designing one, but not anymore.