100+ Most Useful & Handy Web Design Tools

As a web designer/developer you must continue to find ways to reduce the time it takes to design/develop websites. There are lots of online web design tools available out there. Sorting through them to find the ones that truly stand out can seem to take more time than you might ever expect to save by using them. But with so many tools out there, how do you ever determine which ones are really useful and which ones are just going to waste your time?

In this article, Tech Wacky rounded up a list of 100+ Most Useful & Handy Web Design Tools that hopefully will be useful for most designers. These are tools that will save you time, make you a more effective designer, speed up your design process, or otherwise make your life easier. Enjoy!

Color Tools
Choosing the right colors for your website designs can be one of the most important decisions you make in the entire design process. Below are some of the best tools available for managing color schemes.

Color Wizard
The Color Wizard is a color matching application for anyone who wants to create designs with great looking colors. The color wizard also has a randomize function that lets you generate color schemes you might not have thought of on your own.

Kuler
Adobe Kuler is an internet application from Adobe Systems that lets individuals try out, create and save various color schemes. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

Color Palette Generator
This tool can create a color palette from any image you choose. You just need to enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. The goal is to provide free, high-quality, web-based tools that are easy to use for all users.

COLOURlovers
COLOURlovers is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. One of the most useful features is it’s pattern creation tool.

ColorZilla
ColorZilla is an advanced Eyedropper, Color Picker, Palette Viewer and other colorful goodies for Firefox. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust the color and paste it into another program.

100 Random Colors 2.0
It is primarily a random color generator that’s intended to help designers truly get out of the “creative block.” Just hit the “Refresh Pallette” and will be given a whole new set if you don’t find anything in the first 100.

Color Scheme Designer
Color Scheme Designer is an easy to use color scheme creator. It let’s you export your selection into Photoshop palette (.ACO) and GIMP palette (.GPL).

Color Hunter
Color Hunter is a place to find and make color palettes created from images. If you have an image, you can upload it and get a color palette based on the colors in the image.

4096 Color Wheel
4096 Color Wheel is a color scheme generator that shows you Web-safe, Web-smart and unsafe colors. You just need to hover over the wheel to view the colors.

Color Gradient Table Generator
The Color Table Generator is a tool designed to create a color table based on various input parameters by the designer. It’s allows the designer to view the color table with specific color index values displayed on colored tiles.

CSS and Typography Tools
CSS is almost as important in web design as HTML. There are many online CSS tools to help web designers produce code easier and quicker. Some of the useful web typography tools include apps for converting pixel sizes to em units and a variety of Lorem Ipsum and other dummy text generators.

Flipping Typical
Flipping Typical is a way to explore the popular typefaces you have on your computer in a grid format. It’s very useful if you don’t want to wade through a few hundred fonts that installed on your computer and just want to see the more popular ones.

Typetester
The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. It also allows you to change the color, leading, tracking, size, and other style options. It’s primary role is to make web designer’s life easier.

HTML-Ipsum
Most standard Lorem Ipsum generators online give you a block of text and nothing more. And that’s great if you’re just trying to fill up some space.

WhatTheFont
Seen a font in use and want to know what it is? Submit an image to WhatTheFont to find the closest matches in the database. Or, let cloak-draped font enthusiasts lend a hand in the WhatTheFont Forum.

Text Generator
Tired of using Lorem Ipsum for dummy text in your latest masterpiece? This text generator has been developed based on years of careful research and is guaranteed to improve even the most lacklustre of designs.

Typechart
Typechart  lets you flip through, preview and compare web typography while retrieving the CSS. You can find fonts based on size, whether they’re serif or sans-serif, or emphasis.

CSS Type Set
CSS Type Set is a hands-on typography tool allowing designers and developers to interactively test and learn how to style their web content. It is a quick and easy way to format any text and then let’s you copy the generated CSS.

PXtoEM.com
PXtoEM.com is px to em conversion made simple. Choose your body font size in pixels (px)and out comes a complete pixel (px) to em conversion table, making elastic web design with CSS a snap. The options it gives you are what make it a really impressive and flexible tool, though.

CleanCSS
CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise.

CSS Property Index
Clicking on any of the included properties brings you to a definition and information about the default value, allowed values, and whether it inherits from a parent property.

CSS Frame Generator
This tool returns corresponding CSS in a line-by-line way indented with spaces to reflect XHTML structure – each selector and all of its properties and values in one line.

Postable
I absolutely hate having to switch all the “< ” and “>” signs in my code to “&lt;” and “&gt;”, respectively. I also hate having to write “&amp;” anytime I want to include an ampersand. This makes including code snippets on my blog and whatnot extremely annoying, and today I finally got fed up. Created by Elliot Swan.

Individual Element Tools
There are a lot of generators out there that make it quick and easy to create buttons, backgrounds, forms, and other design elements for your sites.

Wufoo
Wufoo is a HTML form builder helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need without writing a single line of code.

Jotform
JotForm is an interestig web based WYSIWYG form builder. Its intuitive drag and drop user interface makes form building a breeze. Using JotForm, you can create forms, integrate them to your site and collect submissions from your visitors.

RoundedCornr
This generates a basic box with rounded corners. It will Generate HTML/CSS code and images for rounded corners.

BgPatterns
BgPatterns is a web based tiled backgrounds designer. You can create any pattern your site needs just in few minutes. It let’s you adjust the size, pictures, colors and texture.

Tartan Maker
Tartan Maker offers you to set three colors (by picking from color picker or direct entry of color hex code) of tartan cubes which create the base of image. Then you can control dimensions of these cubes by sliders to adjust the look of tartan pattern.

Stripe Generator 2.0
The Stripe Generator 2.0 offers stripes at a variety of angles, in just about any width you choose, with or without shadows and gradients, and using any hex colors you want.

Pixelknete’s Background Dotter
This background generator creates a modern dotted background with progressively smaller dots as they move down the page. It let’s you select the dot colors, background colors and adjust the pattern’s height.

CSS Menu Maker
This tool generates vertical, horizontal and drop-down menus online. Various color schemes are available, and you can also customize the menus online. The menu generator makes it easy to create custom CSS menus without having to know all the complicated HTML and CSS.

IzzyMenu
IzzyMenu it’s an easy to use Menu Builder, which allows you to build your CSS & DHTML menu in minutes.

Icon Finder
Iconfinder provides high quality icons for web designers and developers in an easy and efficient way.

Favicon
A favicon (short for “favorites icon” and also known as a page icon), is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage that is displayed in the browser address bar next to a site’s URL.

Blogflux Button Maker
You see those 80×15 buttons everywhere. Our Button Maker lets you make some yourself. Fiddling around with Photoshop or any other graphics editor can be a pain. Make 80×15 or 88×13 buttons with a few clicks.

As Button Generator
As Button Generator is a very nice button generator service. You can allocate the image you chosen and the text you typed, they are movable by mouse drag.

Face Your Manga
Create your Avatar with Face Your Manga! Express yourself through your image and share it whoever you want.

Testing Site Layout and Structure
Different browsers render sites in slightly different ways. This can be a huge headache, especially if your clients are using one browser and you’re using a completely different one.

Browsershots
Browsershots makes screen-shots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl.

Browsercam
See your web design on any browser on any operating system. Check javascripts, DHTML, forms and other dynamic functionality on any platform. Use the bank of testing machines remotely to test your website.

Markup Validation Service
Markup that is not well formed may give your site serious presentation issues in some Browsers while they are barely visible on others. It is always recommended to validate your site with the W3C Markup Validator and fix all the errors it reports.

AJAX and JavaScript Tools
Ajax, sometimes written as AJAX (shorthand for asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create interactive web applications or rich Internet applications.

Load Info
AJAX loading animated GIFs that are free to use which have a collection of ajax preloader images that are ready for download.

MooTools
MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer.

jQuery
jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.

Script Aculo US
script.aculo.us provides you with easy-to-use, cross-browser user interface JavaScript libraries to make your web sites and web applications fly.

MISC – More of the Web Tools

Browsershots – Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl.

CSS Sprite Generator – CSS sprites are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests made for image resources referenced by your site.

CSS Tidy Online – It is an online CSS Tidy tool that allows you to keep your code clean by compressing the code.

Markup Generator – Markup Generator is a simple tool created for xhtml/css coders that are tired of writing boring frame code at the very beginning of slicing work.

CSS SuperScrub – This tool can significantly reduce the size and complexity of your CSS by programmatically stripping unneeded content, stripping redundant calls, and intelligently grouping the remaining element names.

JavaScript Beautifier
This beautifier can process your messy or compacted javascript, making it all neatly and consistently formatted and readable.

CSS Text Wrapper – The CSS Text Wrapper allows you to easily make HTML text wrap in shapes other than just a rectangle.

Grid Designer 2.4 – This tool enables you to create a grid by specifying the number of columns and the widths of the columns, gutters and margins.

Blue Print CSS – Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.

Em Calculator – Em Calculator is a small JavaScript tool which helps making scalable and accessible CSS design. It converts size in pixels to relative em units, which are based on a text size.

Button Browser – It’s a button gallery and button maker.

FormSpring – FormSpring gives businesses and organizations an easy way to build any type of online form, integrate it with their website and begin collecting data. With FormSpring anyone can build all types of web forms, collect data online and do it simply and efficiently.

Mikons – An online drawing tool to make your own. A Mikon is a symbol about you.

Yola – Yola lets you make great-looking sites with webpages that work beautifully together. The website builder lets you easily take what’s in your head and turn it into webpages in front of your eyes.

Background Image Maker – An application to create the simple background images.

Fontifier – Fontifier lets you use your own handwriting for the text you write on your computer. It turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a handwriting font that you can use in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica.

Font Tester – Font Tester is a free online font comparison tool. It allows you to easily preview and compare different fonts side by side with various CSS font styles applied to them.

CSStxt – Csstxt is a webtool that propose to illustrate the many ways you got to add a style to a text with a p or div tag.

Designer Plaything – Designer Plaything lets you experiment with different web typography and color combinations. It also allows you to check color accessibility. There’s a web-based version and a downloadable version which you can grab on this page.

Dummy Text Generator – Dummy text is also known as ‘fill text’. This handy tool helps you create dummy text for all your layout needs.

GoldenRatioCalculator – If you want to dramatically improve composition of your website design, you might need to consider applying the divine proportion to your design. This tools calculates the golden ratio for your designs.

TypeNavigator – TypeNavigator is a very clever web tool that can help designers identify typefaces.

Templatr – This is a handy web application for  creating web page templates. It has a very simple user interface, making itself an excellent tool for quick-and-dirty mockups of web layouts.

Phpform – This is an online HTML form builder.

Dabbleboard – Dabbleboard is a convenient web-based collaborative drawing tool that’s designer-friendly. Create web layouts, design user interfaces, or draw freehand with other fellow designers.

ThemePress – ThemesPress is a service that allows you to automatically convert your HTML and CSS based design into a WordPress blog theme, allowing you to take full control of the look of your blog without having to know or bother with PHP.

My Cool Button – Make your button in only 4 steps.

StyleIgnite – StyleIgnite is useful for designers as a source of inspiration to help you design new layouts, graphics and techniques.

ColorSchemer – ColorSchemer Studio 2 is a professional color matching application for anyone from hobbyists to advanced professionals.

ColorJack – A color scheme gallery that explores color theory.

GrayBit – GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page’s perceived contrast.

CSSRound – Cssround creates a text page with round corner in 10 seconds.

Bradicon – Bradicon takes your image file and converts it into an icon resource that can be used for a shortcut, a program, or as a favicon.

TabCreatr – TabCreatr.com is an application that allows you to create your own tabs and Css menus.

Text2PNG – text2PNG.com provide webmasters with the ability to convert their website headlines and navigations to PNG images automaticlly.

Glassy Buttons – This is a free online glass button generator that let you create custom glassy style buttons.

ColorCombos – This site was built to help web developers quickly select and test website color combinations. Surely you will find the perfect color combination for your project.

Artypapers Buttons – Artypapers Buttons are small buttons you can collect for display on your website. So far there are 19 buttons.

Gradient Image Maker – This is an online tool that allow you to painlessly generate a gradient image of 3 types, with instant previewing so you get exactly what you had in mind.

EmChart – EmChart is very useful for calculating bottom margins, line-heights (which are unitless, but the formula still applies), top margins, and top/bottom padding among other things.

HTM2PDF – This site is a service to convert webpages or raw html code into PDF documents.

ConvertIcon – Converticon is a simple icon utility.  It can import ICO, PNG, GIF, and JPEG formats and export to high-quality PNG or ICO files.

FontStruct – Is a free font-building tool that lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.

Vector Magic – Convert bitmap images to vector images with a few simple clicks. Just upload your image and Vector Magic will vectorize it for you.

Form Style Generator – Create your own CSS-styled Web forms in only 3 steps.

Wordoff – Wordoff is simple and useful web tool that lets you remove unnecessary tags and styles from HTML code.

AjaxLoad – This site will help you generate AJAX load icon for your project.

Splashup – Splashup is a powerful editing tool and photo manager. With the features professionals use and novices want, it’s easy to use, works in real-time and allows you to edit many images at once.

Resize Image – This free service will help you to re-size your images with basic and advanced options.

Lorem 2 – This tool provides you with an “all around better Lorem experience.” It contains short paragraphs, long paragraphs, short list items and long list items to use in your wireframes.

CSS Drop-Down Menu Framework – A cross-browser, modular framework that contains 14 customizable templates for designing drop-down-menus.

Validation Hint – Validation Hints is a simple script that aides in form validation. It makes sure that password and username fields are the specified length, and can even validate against regular expressions. Small and handy

Graph Paper – This graph paper is made for visual designers, interactive designers and information architects. You’ll find styles for wireframing user interfaces, storyboarding interaction and plotting values on a two-by-two grid.

Fixed-Width CSS Layouts – There are a total of 53 fixed-width CSS layouts for downloading. All markup has been validated against a strict Doctype.

Dojo – Ajax, events, packaging, CSS-based querying, animations, JSON, language utilities, and a lot more.

Mini Ajax – Mini Ajax is a showroom of nice looking simple downloadable DHTML and AJAX scripts.

Firebug – Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

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