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99 OF THE BEST FREE TOOLS FOR WEB DESIGNERS AND WEB DEVELOPERS

Learning the skills you need for web design or web development is the first step toward working on the web—but that also means familiarizing yourself with the tools of the trade. That’s why we put together this list of 99 free tools you’ll need for either web-development, web design, or both.


Every resource on this list is free to use and complements the skills we teach in our Web Design, Web Developer, and Front End Developer Blueprints (instructor-led classes that walk you through the fundamentals of each role).


As you learn, keep this list handy and think of it as your own virtual toolbox.


Table of Contents:

Web Design Resources

  • Newsletter Lists

  • Software + Apps

  • Photos

  • Symbols + Icons

  • Fonts

  • Colors

  • Backgrounds + Textures

  • UI (User Interface) Kits/Guides

  • Web Development Resources

Web Development Resorce

  • Domain Name Search Engines

  • Frameworks, Templates, Code Packs, + Themes

  • Code Style Guides

  • Code Validation

  • Web Design Resources

This web designing tools list includes web designing tools for beginners, as well as design resources that will serve you through an entire career.


NEWSLETTER LISTS

1. Creative Market

Before you do anything else, go get on the Creative Market newsletter list. Once a week, you’ll get an email packed with 5 free downloads, including everything from patterns and fonts to templates and themes.


SOFTWARE + APPS

These software programs and web applications provide a solid foundation for web design.


2. CoffeeCup Software

They offer up all sorts of free apps for web designers, including an HTML editor, web form builder, shopping cart designer, and many others.


3. InVision app

Powerful prototyping and collaboration tools. You can get high-fidelity mockups and prototypes in just minutes.


4. Pixlr

Edit images right in your browser.


5. Canva

Amazingly easy graphic design software that anyone can use. The search and drag function is so simple and helpful!


6. Easel.ly

Awesome free infographic templates.




PHOTOS

Photos are a critical part of web design. These stock photo resources are key go-to’s when you need the right photo right now.


7. Unsplash

Some of the most gorgeous free stock photos out there, and with tons of variety. New images are added every day.


8. PicJumbo

Get free photos delivered to your inbox that are totally free for personal and commercial use.


9. Gratisography

Free high-resolution images that you can use in personal and commercial projects. They have easy-to-browse categories: animals, nature, objects, whimsical, and more.


10. Compfight

Search tons of images licensed for personal and/or commercial use, mostly from Flickr.


11. IM Free

Curated web design resources, including a ton of categorized photos, plus icons and templates.


12. Stock Up

Search over 9,000 photos from 26 different websites, all in one place.


13. Death to the Stock Photo

Get on their email list and get their free photo packs in your inbox once a month.


14. Little Visuals

If you join their list, you’ll get 7 free high-res photos emailed to you once a week.


15. New Old Stock

Get free, vintage photos from public archives.


16. Cupcake

Free, high-res photos by Jonas Nilsson Lee.


17. Pexels

10 new free stock photos every day.


18. Magdeleine

1 free high-res photo per day.


19. SplitShire

Free, high quality stock photos by an Italian photographer.


20. ISO Republic

High quality stock photos marketed to creatives.


21. Paul Jarvis

Sign up to get 20 of Paul Jarvis’s top photos for free.




SYMBOLS + ICONS

Looking for symbols or icons to use on your website? Look no further.


22. Pixeden

Tons of free icon sets, including weather icons, social icons, line icons, and many others.


23. Iconmonstr

More than 2800 boldly graphic icons in a few different styles.


24. Captain Icon

Over 350 free vector icons for mobile and web designs.


25. Linear Icons

An icon font with 170 different icons to choose from.


26. Font Awesome

A symbol font that allows you to add symbols to your websites.


27. Fontello

Generates icon font packs.


28. flaticon

Download vector icons or include icons as webfonts.


29. The Noun Project

Search a noun, get a free symbol or icon.


30. Endless Icons

Free icon library.


31. Perfect Icons

Customize and optimize social media icons for your site.


32. iconSweets

60 free vector Photoshop icons.


33. Round Icons

Free quirky and professional icon bundles.




FONTS

Fonts are such a crucial part of design that they can be easy to overlook. Look here instead and find the fonts to take your design to the next level.


34. Google Webfonts

Add fonts to your website in just a few clicks.


35. typegenius

Font pairing generator.


36. Font Squirrel

Hundreds of totally free fonts.


37. Beautiful Web Type

Check out a curated collection of the most beautiful Google Webfonts.


38. Lost Type

Gorgeous pay-what-you-can fonts.




COLORS

Need help dialing in the best colors for your design? These color tools are at your service.


39. Material UI

A gallery of Material Design and flat design colors to use in your designs.


40. Paletton

Start with any color and get a palette (with 5 shades per color) based on a few different color scheme patterns: monochromatic, adjacent, triad, tetrad, or custom.


41. Design Seeds

Tons of great color palettes taken from photographs. You can search by keyword or for similar colors.


42. Adobe Color Wheel

Choose from different types of color pairings and save your color palettes.


43. Material Palette

Generate a color palette based on 2 colors.


44. Flat UI Color Picker

The name says it all.


45. Flat UI Colors

Ditto.


46. Bootflat

Flat color picker.


47. Coolors

Color palette generator.


48. Skala Color

Free color picker download.


49. BrandColors

Check out the exact colors that major brands use.


50. 0 to 255

Find the perfect color variation you’re looking for.


51. Colour Lovers

Browse user color palettes and add your own to the community.


52. Palette for Chrome

Generates color palettes based on images.




BACKGROUNDS + TEXTURES

Photos, fonts, and colors aren’t the end of a design—you also need backgrounds and textures to holds them all together. Find yours with these tools.


53. Pattern8

Tons of funky, bold, and bright repeating patterns to choose from.


54. Repeat-X Repeat-Y

Amazing repeating patterns from around the world.


55. Texture King

All the textures you could ever want: grunge, rust, plaster, concrete, dirt, and many more.


56. Patternico

Create your own patterns using Font Awesome icons. Customize the background color, canvas size, and shape transparency.


57. Subtle Patterns

Free downloadable patterns.


58. Lost and Taken

Free textures in a ton of categories, including cardboard, stone, metal, bubbles, seamless, and more.


59. BG Patterns

Create seamless patterns with customizable colors, shapes, and more.




UI (USER INTERFACE) KITS/GUIDES

Web design is more than just visual appeal. The way a site’s user interface “feels” to the user is also a critical factor. These tools will help make sure your own UI design is on point.


60. 55+ Elements Free UI Kit

A clean, modern UI kit. Be sure to search around on the Behance website for tons of great resources from other designers!


61. Oh no, not another UI Kit

A simple, flat, open-source mobile and web UI kit that comes as a PSD file.


62. PSD Booster Freebies

Tons of great Photoshop freebies, including UI kits, themes, and more.


63. Material Design Guidelines

The official guide to Google’s Material Design standards.




Web Development Resources

After a website is designed, it needs to be developed! Whether you’re working on both sides of the process (designing AND building a site), or building a site based on someone else’s designs, these developer tools will help you make that design a virtual reality.




DOMAIN NAME SEARCH ENGINES

Domain names are at the heart of a website—they’re the direct address where users can find your site online. But the internet is a crowded place, and it can be hard to find the exact domain name you want. These tools will help you find out of a name you want is available, and to create one that IS if your first choice isn’t.


64. Namemesh

A powerful domain name search engine that helps you find domains that are short, fun, common, similar, and various other qualifiers.


65. Nameboy

Enter a keyword or two and get a list of available domains that incorporate them.


66. Panabee

Describe what you want in two words and Panabee will generate a list of potential domain names.


67. Impossibility

Generate random domain names based on one word.


68. LeanDomainSearch

Search for a domain name by keyword.




FRAMEWORKS, TEMPLATES, CODE PACKS, + THEMES

Sometimes you’ll need to code every part of a website from scratch—but sometimes you won’t. Here’s a list of frameworks, templates, code packs, and themes you can use to cut down on heavy lifting.


69. WP-Flex

A blank, responsive WordPress theme boilerplate that follows the official WordPress Codex best practices and requirements.


70. Foundation

An advanced responsive framework that’s one of the most popular out there.


71. Ionic

Create mobile apps using the web technologies you know and love.


72. Initializr

Quickly generate a template based on HTML5 Boilerplate.


73. Materialize

A modern, responsive framework based on Google’s Material Design specifications.


74. WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

If you want to create WordPress plugins, the Plugin Boilerplate is a standardized, object-oriented starting point.


75. Front-end Boilerplate

A basic starting point for creating your websites so you don’t have to recreate everything from scratch each time.


76. HTML5 Boilerplate

The first and the best. Free HTML5 boilerplate code.


77. HTML5 UP

Free fully responsive HTML5 template.


78. 1 Line CSS Grid Framework

A framework for CSS that’s only 1 lines long!


79. 960 Grid System

A Skillcrush favorite.


80. Starkers for WordPress

A basic template for developing your first WordPress theme.


81. Barebones for WordPress

Free WordPress template for developers.


82. Underscores

WordPress template for building out a brand-new theme.


83. Sage for WordPress

A WordPress starter theme based on HTML5 boilerplate and Bootstrap.


84. Whiteboard for WordPress

A clean, basic WordPress theme for developers.


85. Bootstrap

A responsive HTML, CSS, and JS framework.


86. Bootswatch

Free themes for Bootstrap.




CODE STYLE GUIDES

You can’t start coding without learning basic skills, but once you have those skills nailed it’s time to learn how to code artfully. These guides will teach you best coding practices that will elevate your work beyond the basic level.


87. Web Field Manual

A collection of resources, best practices, inspiration, and reference materials for modern coding. There are also sections filled with tools and additional resources and language-specific information.


88. Google Developers Web Fundamentals

A comprehensive resource for web development best practices, right from Google. Perfect for both new developers and those who want to make their projects better.


89. Deployments Best Practices

Before you deploy a website or app, be sure to check out these best practices to make sure everything goes smoothly.


90. GitHub

GitHub’s very own code style guide.


91. Google

Google’s code style guide.


92. Mozilla

A code style guide from the pros at Mozilla.



CODE VALIDATION

Finished with that website? Not so fast. Before marking that project “done,” use these tools to wrap up loose ends in your code and check to see if you’re meeting standards of accessibility, style, and industry best practices.


93. w3.org


94. Web Design Group HTML Validator


95. Validome


96. Validator.nu


97. Code Beautify


98. JSLint


99. Free Formatter




Ready to combine these tools with the skills you need to make money in tech? Check out our programs page to find the Skillcrush Blueprint course that’s right for you. In just three months you can be qualified to start working on the web.


Thank you Scott Morris


Scott Morris is Skillcrush's staff writer and content producer. Like all the members of Skillcrush's team, he works remotely (in his case from Napa, CA). He believes that content that's worth reading (and that your audience can find!) creates brands that people follow. He's experienced writing on topics including jobs and technology, digital marketing, career pivots, gender equity, parenting, and popular culture. Before starting his career as a writer and content marketer, he spent 10 years as a full-time parent to his daughters Veronica and Athena.


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