Design & Dev Tools

19 Free Design Tools for Your Website

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Web Marketing Today. Practical Ecommerce acquired Web Marketing Today in 2012. In 2016, we merged the two sites, leaving Practical Ecommerce as the successor.

If you have a small business website, chances are you can use all the free design help you can get.

Here is a list of tools and resources to help you with website design. There are font, icon and image tools, as well as audio and video applications. Also there are resources to give you ideas and generate your design inspiration. All of these tools are free.

Free Website Design Tools

Niice. Niice is an inspiration search engine, letting you search across multiple sources, such as Behance, Dribbble, Designspiration, and Fubiz.

Web Design Library. Web Design Library is a platform for the dissemination of web design thinking and research. It covers all theoretical and practice-oriented design, advancing a comprehensive view of what’s hot, what’s not, and what it all means.

The Design Inspiration. The Design Inspiration is created by a group of designers, seeking daily design inspiration. It features logos, illustrations, websites, photos, and patterns from designers around the world.

Font Squirrel. Font Squirrel is a resource for free, handpicked, high-quality, commercial-use fonts. It features newly discovered fonts, most popular fonts, a forum, and more. Each font has a row of symbols indicating free uses allowed.

Typetester. Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of common fonts is updated.

Iconizer. This is a tool to find and modify icons. Change the background or foreground color, saturation, image angle, and more.

Icon Finder. Icon Finder is an icon search engine for web designers and developers. Search through nearly 300,000 icons and 1,300 icon sets.

Freepik. Freepik is a search engine that helps graphic and web designers to locate high quality photos, vectors, illustrations, and PSD files for their creative projects. Freepik’s goal is to become one of the most important sources of graphics related free content.

Gimpshop. Gimpshop is a free, downloadable photo and image editing software program built to rival Adobe Photoshop. It incorporates an intuitive user-interface, a wide array of filters, and high-end advanced tools.

Paint.net. Paint.net is free image and photo editing software. It features an intuitive user interface with layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety tools. An active community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

Inkscape. Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Kuler. Kuler is a free color theme application, available for iPhone or through a browser, that’s part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. With your smartphone capture colors from a mural, garden, or wherever you happen to be. Create and share color combinations, browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community, and start using them in your design.

Color.hailpixel.com. Color.hailpixel.com is an intuitive color picker. Move your mouse back and forth for hue, up and down for lightness, and scroll for saturation. Click to save the color and start another color.

ColorZilla. ColorZilla has a number of useful advanced color tools for designers. It contains an Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Color Analyzer, a CSS gradient editor, image to CSS converter, and more.

Handbrake. HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any unencrypted DVD or BluRay sources.

Audacity. Audacity is a free downloadable audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Record live audio, convert audio into digital recordings, and edit and mix sound files.

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

Wix. Wix is a free do-it-yourself website builder with a large selection of templates for businesses and services that are easily customized. Upload your own content, or use Wix’s free website design elements, such as images, animation, clip art and icons. Use the simple drag and drop editor to create your own website, mobile website or Facebook page.

Moonfruit. Moonfruit is another free website builder. It has a wide range of templates, background, images and fonts. Easily build and customize your site with the drag and drop editor. Showcase images, layer them, crop or make them transparent. Moonfruit’s free plan also offers basic ecommerce functionality to add products and push them on social networking streams.

Sig Ueland
Sig Ueland
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