As a web designer by trade, I’m always looking out for more information to help expand my skills as a designer. Alongside that, I love to finding useful and 100% free tools that help with the design process.
We all love a great free product and when it’s useful we’re even more grateful that something like it exist for us as web designers at no cost. That’s why I created a list of 6 free tools for web designers that you will definitely be adding to your toolkit after learning about them.
SmallPDF
This Swiss based company provides the useful service of allowing you to manipulate PDF files in a multitude of ways such as Compression, Editing, Merging, File Converting and Security. I cannot tell you how many times I have used this to help deal with PDF content for clients. Though all the tools are free to use, they are limited to how many times you can use them per day. Usually, I don’t find that I ever go over this amount but a simple IP address change can fix that easily.
LibreStock
Stock Photos, the best friend to any designer. However, finding the right photo can not only be difficult, but pretty pricey. What if I told you there was a website that searches a database of over 40 free stock photo websites to help you find the perfect photo? You think I would be crazy to say that, but it exists and it’s called LibreStock. This is the biggest searchable database for high quality free stock images on the internet. If you need a stock photo for any project that’s on a tight budget, LibreStock is here to help.
Vivus.js
Animations on websites really make the whole experience more dynamic for users. Have a beautiful line icon you want to animate? Then say a mighty hello to Vivus; a javascript class that allows you to animate SVGs. They have a variety of different animations available as well as the option to create custom script to draw your SVG in whatever way you like. On top of that, they have a web-based testing platform for you to drag-and-drop your SVGs. Test out the animations and even extract the animation code in CSS, what are you waiting for?
WhatTheFont (from Myfonts.com)
Ever looked at a sign, packaging or poster and thought ‘Wow! Now that’s a nice font. I wonder what it is?’. Well, WhatTheFont can help with that. This free service allows you to upload an image of the font to WhatTheFont to find the closest matches in their database. You need to make sure the image is clear to get the best results. Though it may not work 100% of the time, it can be helpful to find out about new fonts and get some inspiration. If the results aren’t what you’re looking for, they also have a forum filled with font experts that can help you find out what that font is.
Pingdom Speed Test
When building a website, we always need to ensure that we’re building a website that is quick to load. Nobody loves a slow website as according to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, about half of web users expect a site to load within 2 seconds. Pingdom created a free speed test tool that will analyse the load speed of your website and give suggestions on how to make it faster. Pingdom also gives you 4 testing locations which can help get a more realistic grasp of the load time for your client’s target audience.
Wetransfer.com
You’re working with a client on an important project and that deadline is just around the corner. You need to send them a ton of files but they’re too big to send it via email and you don’t have enough cloud space for them! A quick and easy solution is to use WeTransfer. This free service allows anyone to send up to 2GB to anyone with an email address which is perfect for anyone on a budget. With a simple drag-and-drop system, WeTransfer is super easy to send files to clients with only an email needed to get things going.
