We all have tools to help improve workflow. Whether you are a veteran looking for new ideas to approach your design and development problems or you’re a student trying to find some cool tools to help get your designs off the ground, browser extensions and web apps can save you tons of time.
Here is a list of ten top apps that I find extremely useful everyday!
Awesome Screenshot
Awesome Screenshot is amazingly easy to use Google Chrome extension and is great for getting and giving feedback on designs as well as writing up tutorials for clients on how to do things (like add a photo to a slideshow in wordpress.)
Eye Dropper
A great little Chrome extension that lets you pick colors from a website and returns hexidecimal, hsl, and rgb values for you to quickly incorporate into your designs.
Page Ruler
Another Chrome extension that offers a quick way to measure items in-browser.
Flaticon.com
I just discovered flaticon.com and can see myself using it a lot in the future. Along with the tons of simple free icons, you can also build your own icon font from their available stash and incorporate it on your website!
Font Squirrel
Font Squirrel offers free high quality commercial-use fonts and most are available as web fonts.
Don’t forget to make sure your fonts look good in Chrome on PC by following this little trick: https://www.adtrak.co.uk/blog/font-face-chrome-rendering/
Text Fixer
You finally got all the content and they want to launch the site tomorrow. Oh yeah, there’s also a line break embedded into the end of every line… Yikes!
Good thing Text Fixer can strip those out with a quickness, along with tons of other text related tools!
Colour Lovers
Colour Lovers keeps me up to date on trending color – or colour – options and combinations as well as great patterns. Great for finding that next palette!
Sublime Text Plugins:
The next three are plug-ins for Sublime Text. If you’re not coding with Sublime, I highly recommend checking it out!
SFTP/FTP
The SFTP/FTP Plugin is amazing. Once it’s set up it lets you upload your files automatically on save making for laser-fast development, especially with WordPress!
CSS Format
I love clean css, but when you’re slangin’ code ain’t nobody got time for that… Use the CSS Format plugin to clean up your code, then compress it when it’s time to go live!
Tag
The glory that is the auto closing tag. Tag adds that functionality to Sublime Text plus much more!
Conclusion
This is only a little taste of what I use day in and day out. What tools and apps do you use to speed up your design and development workflow? Share yours in the comments!