Free Tools for Web Designers and Site Maintenance
Color palettes, image optimization, favicons, and the recurring small tasks behind building and maintaining a website.
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.
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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.
A robots.txt and sitemap generator is worth running on every new site before launch — it's a five-minute technical SEO step that's easy to forget entirely if it's not part of a standard checklist.
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.
The complete set: