Create Super Sites with CSS Tools and Resources
Designing a website can be a tedious task considering the amount of work that needs to be put into it: Find your host, plan it out, code every page, then some more pages, and then more, and then well, you get the idea.
However, some web designers or developers will look for ways to increase efficiency by using swift methods. What are those, you may ask? I don’t mean you can just copy and paste another’s website, make it your own, and call it done! You can, however, make use of tons of tools and resources that are out there for designers to make good use of!
There are so many generous designers and developers who code up the coolest utilities and place them on the web for just one purpose: Make another web designer and developer’s work super easy. That’s it! So, why not make use of these handy-dandy tools, apps, and libraries to build your website? Allow them to make your life simple, just like they are meant to!
Here’s a long list of resources and tools that every designer MUST have a look at! We decided to go for CSS tools and resources since it is currently the mother-of-all main elements that bring a web page to life. Another reason is because the latest “cool tools” offered by web developers are abundantly offered in CSS (Which is short for: Create Super Sites. No, I’m just kidding.) So, let’s take a look!
CSS Web-based Tools, Apps, and Libraries
CCS Shrink
Now, don’t get the wrong idea here. This isn’t your typical “shrink” or therapist. Although, he might relax your over-loaded web page code by reducing the size to about half or less than half the size. This cool app shrinks your CSS file by a considerable amount, making it less heavy and load faster.
CSS Synth
This CSS tool will allow you to display your animations just the way you want them to. Is there a specific order that would be best for how your animations are displayed? If so, use the CSS Synth to set your preferences with respect to your animations. You can even set the delay time, prefixes, duration, etc. It’s a super easy tool with a super easy interface.
CSS Frame Generator
CSS Frame Generator is a great tool where all you have to do is to put in your XHTML code, hit the “Give Me My Code” button (angrily), and they’ll generate a CSS frame for you in a jiffy.
Postable
Tired of the copy paste, ampersand, and the <, and >? Postable is an ultra-friendly app that will insert those signs for you. Elliot Swan, the designer, said that he himself got sick and tired of those codes, snippets that have to be inserted again and again. When he finally got fed up he made Postable.
“I absolutely hate having to switch all the ‘<‘ and ‘>’ signs in my code to ‘<‘ and ‘>,’ respectively. I also hate having to write “&” any time I want to include an ampersand. It makes including code snippets on my blog and whatnot extremely annoying, and today I finally got fed up.” -Elliot Swan
Formalize
Formalize is designed to help designers with their “forms”. In the end, when you are ready to put up your website, what’s left is the task of form styling. Default forms can look great or awful based on what browser and operating system is being used. Inconsistent and disfigured forms are improved with the help of this app.
CSSMatic
Web designers, this is the ultimate tool for you! CSS Matic will allow you to generate gradients, design border radiuses, add noise texture, and box shadows. The box shadow has all sorts of options to blur radius, change colors, shadow size, shadow direction, and much more. Similarly, with the noise texture options you can create subtle background patterns, change noise opacity, and more.
CSS Menu Maker
CSS Menu maker enables you make awesome menus that are easy, clean, and responsive. It has all the tools needed to create customized menus that are compatible will CSS and all browsers. You don’t have to figure out the complicated codes. Just use the menu generator to auto-generate cool menus without any hassle. Source code is provided so that you can modify the code and tweak it the way you like.
Kotatsu
Need a table on your website? (Of course, I meant the data table. What did you think?) Kotatsu will be your easy-to-make table guide. Forget about the coding and forget about Dreamweaver! Just type in your rows and columns into this easy-peazy HTML table generator and you’re done!
CSS Buttons Generator
CSS button generator is one marvelous app for creating beautiful CSS buttons. The best part is that you can customize your buttons and make them look just the way you want them to! Ditch the images and try these lovely CSS buttons. Type your button text, tweak the font, give it a class name, choose your button style, and change the color! Additionally, you can customize the border, sizing, box shadow, as well as text shadow. So much can go into a simple button to make it just the way you want it to look. CSS button generator will surely generate the perfect button for you in no time. It’s an amazing added feature that has been made for beginners.
CSS Button Libraries
Beautons
Looking for solid, flat buttons? Plain, huge, flat, thin, small, disabled, rounded, band-aid type, Beautons has it all. Beautons believes in the motto, “simple is beautiful.”
Btns.css
If you’re into black, white, gray, or blue, you have to check out Btns buttons. They are beautifully designed buttons for black and white theme-d webpages. Another plus point is that their flatness and simplicity makes them look amazing.
Social Buttons v2
Looking for a collection of easy to use, responsive social buttons for your flat website? Social Buttons version 2 has just that! All you have to do is simply copy and paste the code to your HTML and voila! Allow your viewers to share, tweet or pin the page they like with just the click of a button.
CSS Animation Libraries
CSShake
You could shake up that page of yours using the CSShake codes. Shake those buttons, text, images of your choice and make them move to the groove of your coding. (Even I spent several minutes hovering my pointer just to see how everything shakes. It’s so addictive!)
Hover.css
Available in CSS, Sass, and LESS, hover.css will give you collection of CSS3 powered hover effects. You can apply them anywhere (logos, buttons, text, images, links, icons etc)! Make them pulse, wobble, buzz, skew, sweep in and out, or anything with just a little code and imagination. It doesn’t just end there. This tool also offers speech bubbles, border transitions, and even paper curling effects.
CSS Typography Tools
CSSFontStack
CSS Font stack offers a huge stack of common fonts. The complete collection, although large, is mean to be web safe. With these web safe fonts you won’t have to worry about non-preinstalled fonts that don’t support every operating system.
CSS TypeSet
CSS typeset is a great tool designed to allow web-developers to test different typography styles. Just copy paste the text and play around with the settings (i.e. font color, size, style, spacing, etc) and see what suits you best!
Typesettings
Typesettings is a wonderful typetool kit that uses Ems for typing instead of REMs or pixels. It is based on modular scale, vertical rhythm, and responsive ratio-based headlines. The modular scale values are used to set font-size. Default type styles are an option and you can also adjust tons of settings (i.e. headlines). Overall, it is a highly functional typetool kit with numerous settings.
Sassline
Sassline uses Sass mixins and rems to work proportionally with baseline grids. This gives you typographic control and the ability to align your text and columns on the grid easily. A precise vertical rhythm is set to enable this function.
FrameWorks
Materialize
Looking for a totally modern look to your website? How about using a framework that mimics Google’s latest Material Design theme? Flat, bold, and realistic is the “new” look they are promoting. Materialize is a “modern responsive front end framework” based on Google’s Material design. The icons, typography, styles, elements, components, and animations all utilize Material design principles. The beautiful design language successfully translates concepts of science and art into technology and innovation. This is definitely, the next big thing this year!
Looking for another Material Framework?
Material UI
Check out Material UI which also uses Google’s Material design principles to implement it on a CSS framework with an added touch of React-powered components.
PowertoCSS
PowertoCSS is a great framework with all the four necessary qualities of a modern-day website: lightweight, easy to learn, themeable, and blazing flast! The developers claim that they try to keep everything simple, easy, and memorable. I also picked up a memorable quote from here!
“Learning never exhausts the mind.” -Leonardo da Vinci
Grid Designer 2.4
If you are looking to designing your own grid – with a little bit of help—try out grid designer. It is the perfect combination of a manual grid and a pre-designed grid. Add in the specs of your grid using the columns numbers, columns widths, gutters and margins. Specify your typography, as well, using this tool and then export your final grid.
Compass
Compass is an open-sources CSS authoring framework that uses Sass with an extension of CSS3. The patterns are re-usable, sprite creation is easy, and you can create beautiful typographic rhythms. You do need to be familiar with Sass for this one.
CSS Icon Generators
Sosa Icons
Sosa offers a large collection of hand-crafted pixel-based products icons. There are 160+ icons available that are simple, neat, and responsive. Sosa also offers a huge variety of fonts that every designer must have a look at. Themes/templates and prints are also available.
Glyphter
What’s better than a handful of useful and free items? Glyphter is a very resourceful tool for generating icons. It offers a huge collection of cute icons that are out-of-the-ordinary – and free!
Perfect Icons
Perfect icons present to you a perfect collection of resolution independent social icons. Download, extract, upload, copy, paste, and your done!
Color Palettes
Colors
Looking for some eye-catchy color palettes? Check out Colors which puts forward the most modern trending colors of today. SASS/LESS/Stylus/CSS variables and CSS classes have been used to build these beautiful palettes. The designers are looking to spread better versions of old colors by replacing them with bolder, brighter, and better colors. They ask everyone, “Please help rid the world of sad colors”.
Pantone
Pantone© colors are on the go. Open yourself to an enormous collections of Pantone© colors using Sass variables. Whether you want the light versions of the bright ones, is entirely up to you. They all web-friendly and retina ready.
Really this tools are useful to create a powerful sites.
anchorLess, the most extensive LESS mixins library:
invader365.github.io/anchorLESS/
Great read! Thanks for the share. CSS Shrink is a great tool to save some loading time and to just have cleaner code. Thanks for the share.