Category:Tools

Design tools I love to use. And by "love" I mean I choose these over the alternatives every time.

Animation

• EZGif helps you rip and optimize animated GIFs.

Calculators

• PX to EM converts pixels to Ems
• Letter Count lets you paste in a string and find out how many characters it is.

Code

• CanIUse tells you which browsers support the HTML/CSS/JS capabilities you want to use, so you can plan accordingly.

Color

Favorites

• Hex-to-RGB and RGB-to-Hex are quick color converters
• Paletton makes building a color palette easier, especially since it includes colorblindness tools
• WebAIM Color Contrast Checker is there to make sure your colors have accessible levels of contrast.

See Colorblindness for additional color tools and Category: Cascading Style Sheets for CSS tools that make gradients and stripes and the like easier.

Other tools

• Pictaculous generates color palettes based on a photograph you upload.
• Color Combo Tester lets you put a few columns of colors next to each other while fiddling with a palette

Content Generators

For image generators see Stock Photography below.

• Lorem Ipsum generator - the original content generator, with options for any length and layout of information.
• Honest Ipsum when someone complains about Latin, you put in dummy text that says "hello I am dummy text"
• Behind the Name: Random Name Generator - my favorite tool for generating persona names
• Random String Generator for when you need garbage GUIDs and such.

Converters

• Pandoc is a command-line tool for converting from one file format (such as HTML) to another (such as MediaWiki)

CSS

See Category: Cascading Style Sheets

Deliverables

• Sketch is my preferred wireframing tool. That's a big deal, because I thought I'd probably wireframe in Photoshop or Visio (!!) for my whole career.
• Omnigraffle is my preferred every-other-diagram tool. I do process flows, site maps, occasionally wireframes, and everything else under the sun in it for work. For home I do everything from timelines (it's kind of hard for timelines) to sketches of the new deck, to family trees or "what is that neighbor's name?" maps.
• Optimal Workshop is my preferred tool for card sorts.
• Nobody can avoid Photoshop or Illustrator, and I prefer Dreamweaver for code.

Iconography

• SVGOMG for everything you want to do to streamline SVGs

Social Media

• Thread Reader - for "unrolling" Twitter threads and making them easier to read

Stock Photography

Diversity-aware stock photography

• Tonl

Stock photo generators

• Placebear - my favorite photo generator, with big colorful bears
• Lorem Pixel

Other stock photo sources

• Morguefile - one of the earliest photo sources I’ve used, with lots of high-res photos.

Time Management

• Asana is my preferred to-do / agile / kanban board. (It does both multi-column boards *and* plain lists.) It also will timeline things that have dates on them. I currently use it to track both my work responsibilities (through work boards that are funded) and my writing/fiction responsibilities (through a free board). When my Asana boards are up to date I feel like I have some bit of control over my life.
• Every Time Zone shows a graphic display of what time it is where you and and where it is everywhere else, so it's easier to plan meetings and such
• Doodle is my current go-to for "I need these 8 distributed people to figure out when we're going to do a thing" whether it's a meeting across companies or a family picnic

UX Thinking

• Category:Design Principles is an ongoing and growing list of design principles and heuristics I use to validate my work

Wiki

• EmbedVideo Extension lets me embed videos in this here wiki.

Wordpress

• Wordpress