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What tools do you use to help you design? - Printable Version

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+--- Thread: What tools do you use to help you design? (/showthread.php?tid=1044)



What tools do you use to help you design? - Darth-Apple - May 19th, 2014

It's no secret that I'm more of a backend developer, but when I'm doing frontend development, I tend to get a little lazy and usually design in browser instead of designing the PSD first. Of course that means that what I had originally envisioned and the final product are two completely different designs, but hey, I'll do whatever works. Tongue

Anyway, what tools do you use to help you in frontend design? I find Colorzilla's gradient editor and their chrome addon to be extremely useful in generating gradients and as a general color picker. I'm honestly not quite sure what I'd do without it considering the fact that I'm not good at generating complex gradients in GIMP. I also use bg.siteorigin.com to generate generic patterns for backgrounds and simple tools such as http://border-radius.com/ for when I (shamefully) forget basic CSS. Tongue

What tools would you recommend?


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - Burned Designs - May 20th, 2014

I am more of a front end designer and I dont even use PSD's to help but My product always turns the way I wanted it too. I can take any Image of a website(not PSD) and envision it into an actual site. I use Colorzilla color picker but I mainly use Notepadd++ to design but if im in a non lazy i use notepad


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - Darth-Apple - May 20th, 2014

(May 20th, 2014 at 9:58 PM)Burned Designs Wrote: I am more of a front end designer and I dont even use PSD's to help but My product always turns the way I wanted it too. I can take any Image of a website(not PSD) and envision it into an actual site. I use Colorzilla color picker but I mainly use Notepadd++ to design but if im in a non lazy i use notepad

The envisioning of the design is by far the hardest part for me. I know CSS well enough to do whatever I want to do with it, but getting everything to fit right as far as the actual design is where I tend to stumble as a designer.


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - Burned Designs - May 20th, 2014

I tend to spend countless hours to get margins to fit and never use pixles for width or top bottom left right use %


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - Darth-Apple - May 20th, 2014

I usually prefer fluid width layouts as well, although I tend to set minimum and maximum widths aggressively in my newer design attempts. For me the most challenging part has always been the colors though.


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - Burned Designs - May 21st, 2014

Color is always challenging you have to choose something that is appealing to you and others.


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - simlink - May 24th, 2014

I'm definitely no great CSS designer from the standpoint of responsive design. All my designs are usually not responsive to the point of multi-device, but will scale up/down for standard monitor ranges, etc. They work on tablets generally, but not on cell phones.

I won't have a choice soon because the software I use for my site is going responsive in the next incarnation. It'll be a learning curve, but should be fun/interesting.

As for tools, I generally use notepad or right from the ACP. I also use colourzilla to find colours, etc.


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - Darth-Apple - May 24th, 2014

(May 24th, 2014 at 3:52 AM)simlink Wrote: I'm definitely no great CSS designer from the standpoint of responsive design. All my designs are usually not responsive to the point of multi-device, but will scale up/down for standard monitor ranges, etc. They work on tablets generally, but not on cell phones.

I won't have a choice soon because the software I use for my site is going responsive in the next incarnation. It'll be a learning curve, but should be fun/interesting.

As for tools, I generally use notepad or right from the ACP. I also use colourzilla to find colours, etc.

You may not be as good with the semantics and technical details, but you have a knack for envisioning an idea and making it happen. That's the key to a great designer right there. Tongue


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - simlink - May 24th, 2014

Okay, I can design but my coding skills are... interesting.
We'll go with that. Tongue


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - Burned Designs - May 28th, 2014

We should build a team guys, Im good with front end designing, Darth Apple is good with back end coding and simlink is good with envisioning ideas.


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - Darth-Apple - May 28th, 2014

(May 28th, 2014 at 12:31 PM)Burned Designs Wrote: We should build a team guys, Im good with front end designing, Darth Apple is good with back end coding and simlink is good with envisioning ideas.

What would we end up designing? If we had a clear vision and project to work for, I'd be all for it.


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - Burned Designs - May 30th, 2014

i dont know maybe web templates or pages, maybe programs, anything really


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - Darth-Apple - May 30th, 2014

I had some forum software/CMS concepts I wouldn't mind developing, but it's a hefty project for one developer. Maybe with one more backend developer and someone with good javascript experience we could make it work.


RE: What tools do you use to help you design? - Divya165 - October 20th, 2020

I'm using the below tools for design

1. Adobe XD
2. Browsersync
3. InVision Studio
4. Loom
5. PandaDoc
7. Yarn