Free Tools for Web Designers and Site Maintenance

The visible design work — layout, typography, the big creative decisions — gets the attention, but a lot of a web designer's actual week is smaller, more mechanical tasks: optimizing an image before upload, generating a favicon, building a mockup to show a client. None of it is hard, but it adds up.

Color systems, not just single colors

A cohesive palette and a matching gradient save the back-and-forth of manually picking complementary colors by eye, especially useful when starting a new project's visual identity from scratch.

The favicon nobody thinks about until launch

It's a tiny detail, but a missing or default favicon is one of the more noticeable signs of an unfinished site — worth generating early rather than as an afterthought.

Image optimization before it becomes a performance problem

Unoptimized images are one of the most common, avoidable causes of a slow-loading site. Compressing and correctly resizing images before they ever get uploaded is a five-minute habit that prevents a much bigger performance conversation later.

Showing a client what something will look like

A design mockup in a realistic device frame communicates a concept far better than a flat image file when presenting to a client who isn't going to visualize it themselves.

Recently added

A handful of newer additions round out the design toolkit: a color contrast checker for accessibility compliance, a font pairing tool with curated heading/body combinations, and visual generators for box-shadow, border-radius, and CSS clip-path — the small CSS details that used to mean digging through documentation.

Watch: the CSS and color tools above

Short clips from our YouTube channel covering the tools above -- each plays on YouTube so you can follow along.

The complete set: