Technology Effect

9 Tools For Managing Your Freelance Design Business Being organized is not something creative types are necessarily known for. However, in managing your freelance design business, it’s a must. In fact, with the exception of one or two, every successful freelancer I know (design or otherwise) has this one thing in common. Organization. Of course there are a lot of different ways to organize your projects, clients, potentials, leads, invoices, etc. And none of them is the definitive, “correct way.” However, I’ve found that having a few select tools can go a long way in making the process a lot easier and even enjoyable. So I’ve rounded up a short, but what I hope is a very helpful, list of tools for managing your freelance design business. Read More 13 Excellent Open Source Tools for Web Designers Open source applications and tools are a great alternative for web designers on a budget. Many open source tools have comparable features to the expensive applicati...

Whether you are designing a clean corporate website or a grunge portfolio site, color is going to play a major role in how the design is perceived by the audience. That’s why it’s important to get the colors right upfront. There are plenty of tools out there made especially for this, but like anything else some are better than others. Here are 10 color tools that I think are exceptionally useful. ColoRotate As well as being a useful way to choose colors, ColoRotate looks cool and is actually fun to use. Instead of using two dimensional viewers, it presents color palettes to you in 3d and in real time. Kuler Kuler is a community driven web app that lets your browse color palettes created by others. You can also create your own by using the color wheel, harmony rules, and color sliders.

“Once you use it, you won’t know how you ever survived without it” is a well worn cliche, applied over the years to every new technological development or advancement in gadgetry made available to the masses. The mobile phone, the electric toothbrush, ceramic hair straighteners – every important discovery of the technological era has been tarred with this overused tagline. And the reason why? Because it’s actually true, and none more so than when talking about iPhone apps. You could probably survive without them, and you have perhaps been doing so, but they just make things so much easier, and not just for restaurant bookings and finding directions. When it comes to web design, there are apps for nearly everything, from helping create color schemes to managing your busy schedule. Here are 15 of the best! 1. Ego Ego is a brilliant way of checking your web statistics on a daily (or even hourly) basis. Able to support sites such as Twitter, Squarespace and Google Analytics, y...

Web designers are often website owners. If you fall into this category, you have probably already realized the importance of knowing and understanding who is coming to your site and what they are doing while they’re there. Whether you are running a blog or an e-commerce site, this information is vital. That’s why it’s key to have a good set of tools providing you with website analytics. There are lots of tools out there, all with different features and different prices. In this post, I’m showing you the best free analytics tools available. Clicky Clicky prides itself on providing real time analytics. The UI is very clean and functional, and there is also a dedicated iPhone version. Google Analytics Google Analytics is probably the most popular free analytics tool available. One of my favorite features is it’s custom reporting. Reinvigorate Reinvigorate also provides real-time stat tracking and can alert you when a visitor performs a particular action on your site. It also f...

If you’re unfamiliar with Adobe AIR, it’s a cross-operating system platform that allows developers to use HTML, Ajax, and Flash to build desktop applications. In the past couple of years AIR has gained a lot of popularity, and there’s been a lot of great applications created, including some that are very useful to web designers. Here are 12 of these AIR apps for web designers that really stand out in terms of functionality and usefulness. Adobe Shortcut App for Creative Suite If you’re like me and have a hard time remembering shortcuts for all of the Adobe products you use, then this app will be a life saver. Image Sizer ImageSizer is an application built to resize, optimize and rename a batch of jpg images producing a zip file containing the images.

Since typography is one of the most challenging and important aspects of web design, it’s important to have useful tools that can make things easier. Here’s a list of tools that will be a big help in making your typography beautiful, and you won’t even have to leave your browser. CSS Type Set CSS Type Set allows you to visually and interactively style text and it generates the CSS. Typetester The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.

Open source applications and tools are a great alternative for web designers on a budget. Many open source tools have comparable features to the expensive applications, and are also free. This makes it possible possible for a web designer to have all the tools and applications needed to complete everyday tasks without even spending a cent. In this article you will find 13 of the best open source tools for web designers. Text Editors Aptana Studio Aptana is a complete web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with thousands of additional plugins created by the community. KompoZer KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.

Useful Tools for Testing Cross Browser Compatibility A few weeks ago I gave you some tips for cross-compatibility, but in this article we are going to focus more specifically on cross-browser compatibility. Building websites to work properly and look good in multiple browsers is a fact of life that web designers must deal with. It is probably one of the most frustrating aspects of designing for the web, but thankfully there are tools out there that can help and hopefully keep you from pulling all of your hair out. Read More Top 5 Content Management Systems for eCommerce eCommerce continues to steadily evolve as it’s become one of the most reliable, and preferable ways to purchase goods. Its very existence has allowed countless number of businesses reach new heights, and take advantage of endless possibilities. As new standards, ideas, and applications for eCommerce role out, the strength of your online presence must support these new trends . Read More ...

There are a lot of content management systems out there, but many of them are overly complicated and require a certain level of technical expertise. However, there are a select few that focus on simplicity and ease-of-use, but still give the designer flexibility in templating features and customization. In this article, we have listed ten of these CMS’s. Some of them are well known, while others you may have never heard of, but deserve a look. If you have a favorite CMS that we didn’t list here, let us know. concrete5 Concrete5 is a free open source CMS that focuses on ease of use, which makes it great for designers. Some key features include a file manager with bulk upload, drag-n-drop layout editor, and an open marketplace of add-ons. ExpressionEngine ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich content management system that empowers thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to easily manage their website. It’s a favorite of famous web design...

Firefox is the browser of choice for most web designers. Not only does it display websites the way they should be displayed, but it also gives users the ability to add tons of functionality and customization through add-ons or plugins. Since Web designers spend most of their day working in a browser it makes since to be able to do things like make edits to css without switching to a different application. If your a Firefox user, but have yet to try any extensions, here are 10 of the most popular among web designers. You should really give them a try. They may just make your life a lot easier. Firebug Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Web Developer The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. One of my favorite features of this extension is being able to edit css o...

About two years ago when I became a full time freelance web designer, I made it a point to operate with little overhead. Even though I was confident I could make it as a freelancer, there was some fear that things might not go as planned. Because of this, I didn’t go out and spend lots of money on equipment and expensive software. My focus was on being frugal and saving money where I could. One way I was able to do this was using free online tools or web apps to perform my everyday tasks as a web designer. Here are 15 free online tools that you will find very useful. Pixlr Pixlr is a powerful online image editing application. Although it can’t do everything Photoshop can do, it has some very impressive features considering it is all done within the browser. Google Analytics Google Analytics is probably the most popular free analytics tool available. It has loads of features including custom views and reports, access sharing, and integration with adsense.

If you’re the type of Web Designer that doesn’t like to get your hands dirty with XHTML and CSS, SiteGrinder 2 could become your best friend. It’s a plugin for Photoshop that can turn a design into a fully functional website. This means you will no longer need to outsource the programming of your designs. Enabling Photoshop to Do More Out of the box, Photoshop is a robust graphics package with a powerful set of tools that enable designers to work their magic and create visually stunning web designs. In a typical web site creation workflow, when the design process is finished, so is Photoshop’s role. However, if you’re using SiteGrinder 2 , Photoshop becomes a fully functional web page building solution. It’s a plugin that makes the transition from design to code seamless. SiteGrinder 2 also ensures that the integrity of the design is maintained. This is so important for designers. Often times in a typical web site creation process, important aspects of a design have to be ...

Finding the right domain name is an important step in creating a successful website. Luckily there are tools out there to help you in this process by not only helping you find available domain names, but also helping you in the creative aspect by giving you suggestions. Here are 10 of these tools to help you find that perfect domain name. Domize Domize is a ajax powered domain name search engine. Domize will check whether unavailable domain names can be bought on the secondary market or whether they’re soon expiring. Most incredibly, Domize runs these additional checks in next to no time, meaning you’re spending less time waiting for page reloads or starting at spinning icons and more time finding your perfect domain name. dnScoop dnScoop.com attempts to estimate a value for an established website or a domain name by using factors such as: links pointing to the domain, popularity of the domain, age of the domain, and pagerank of the domain.

We all know that Macs aren’t the most affordable computers on the market. Purchasing one can take a big chunk out of a web designer’s budget and leave little to purchase software. Thankfully, there are alternatives to the expensive software that we need to do our job. Here are 14 Mac applications that will have you doing everything from editing images to writing code, and they won’t cost you a dime. MAMP The abbreviation “MAMP” stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. With just a few mouse clicks, you can install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X. It is a must have for developing and test websites on your local machine. GIMP GIMP is a versatile graphics manipulation package. It’s considered by many to be an excellent alternative to Photoshop.

Whether you’re a CSS pro or just learning, it’s important to have a good set of tools to speed up and simplify your development. What makes the web so great now, is that many valuable tools can be found online and used inside your browser. Here are 11 online CSS tools that should be a huge help to your CSS development. Grid Designer Grid Designer is an easy to use tool that lets you quickly create complex grid layouts. Drawter Drawter Beta 2 is a tool written in JavaScript and based on jQuery library. It provides you the possibility to literally draw your website’s code. It runs on every single web-browser which makes it really useful and helpful. Each tag is presented as a layer you have drawn. YAML Builder The YAML Builder is a tool for visually creating YAML-based CSS layouts. It allows for the setting of basic layout characteristics like the number and positioning of the content columns, as well as the dynamic creation of grid-based layouts by dragging and dropping sub...