Web design industry is always changing. To help you keep up to date with new tools and services I decided to start a new series of posts called “Useful Tools for Web Designers”.
In this post you will find the new amazing tool from Adobe and also a few more tools to help you improve your web design workflow.
Important! If you have an app or other useful resource you’d like to share, tweet it to @mazeofminds or drop as an e-mail.
Adobe Edge
If you have been following Adobe Labs news lately, maybe you already know that Adobe is working on a new tool for web designers and developers, called “Edge”.
Adobe Edge is a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Edge has the WebKit rendering engine, in my opinion it’s a good choice. Speaking about the user interface, it has a timeline allowing scrubbing and jumping to any point in an animation, properties panels to adjust objects, and a panel to show the actual animation. It reminds me Flash interface. So if you have used Flash before it will be easy for you to catch up. For now you can download and try it for free from Adobe Labs web page. Unfortunately, bad news for Windows XP users – there is no XP support, maybe later but I doubt it.
Expressive Web
As you know HTML5 and CSS3 brings loads of news features and functionality to the modern web. This site from Adobe is a resource and showcase of some of the newest, and most expressive features being added to the web today.
Fractal
If you are an email designer and you are tired of trawling through check lists, this tool is for you. See exactly which lines of code are not supported in over 24 email clients.
Font Fonter
FontFonter uses custom CSS and other techniques to temporarily replace a site’s font styles with Web Fonts.
Flickr Bomb
If you are tired of dull and gray placeholder images in you web prototypes then FlickrBomb is for you. It’s a new tool from web design agency Zurb. FlickrBomb will place relevant images from Flickr into your web prototypes. It’s very easy to use, easy to implement, and it makes it easy to change the images pulled from Flickr.
Gridless
Gridless is an awesome HTML5 and CSS3 boilerplate that has everything including CSS normalization, beautiful typography, a well-organized folder structure, IE bugfixes and other useful tricks. It can be very helpful if you are making mobile first responsive, cross-browser websites.