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11 of the Best New Design Tools

5 Mins read

Looking for the latest and greatest design tools to elevate your projects? Look no further than our list of the best new design tools. With innovative features, intuitive interfaces, and powerful functionality, these tools are sure to revolutionize your workflow and help you create stunning designs in less time than ever before.

Designing is an art that requires a lot of creativity and skill. As the world is progressing, so are the design tools. Every year, new and improved design tools are being introduced in the market to make designing more accessible and efficient for designers. In this article, we have compiled a list of some of the best new design tools that every designer should know about.

Best New Design Tools

The last year has seen a wealth of new tools emerge for web designers. Here we introduce the best of the bunch.. It’s been an interesting time recently for web design, thanks to things such as the release of the Retina display the new iPad, responsive web design taking off, a renewed emphasis on mobile-first design – and a lot of discussion over vendor prefixes. Hand in hand with all of this, a lot of new tools have come along.

So let’s have a look at some of them and how you can incorporate them into your workflow. In browser coding tools We’ve had JSBin, jsFiddle, jsdo.it and friends for a while, but there are a couple of new entrants. Dabblet by Lea Verou is an ‘interactive playground for quickly testing snippets of CSS and HTML’ that saves out of Github gists. I find it extremely handy for mocking up a small piece of functionality, particularly interactive CSS things such as animations because it has keyboard shortcuts and awesome previews for CSS values, and vendor prefixes are handled automatically via Verou’s prefix-free library.

1. Dabblet

Dabblet
Image credit: Dabblet

Dabblet‘s layout is also highly customizable, enabling you to mix code and result, or even overlay the code on the result. You can also get each Dabblet as a full-page result only, and embed a Dabblet using an iframe. As it relies on CORS, Dabblet doesn’t support older browsers, but it works just fine in Firefox, Safari, Chrome and the most recent IE 10 beta.


2. CodePen

codepen
Image credit: CodePen

The brand new CodePen is a “little one-page app for playing around with frontend code”, by Alex Vazquez, Tim Sabat, and Chris Coyier. It has impressive input options, facilitating the use of Jade, Slim or HAML in the HTML tab, LESS, Stylus, SCSS with Compass, or Sass with Compass in the CSS tab, and CoffeeScript in the Javascript tab.

You can add a CSS reset, use prefix-free, include a Javascript library or link to an external CSS or JavaScript file. It also enables you to save Github gists, gives you a full-page result and works in IE+8.


3. Figma

figma Best New Design Tools
Image credit: figma

Figma is a cloud-based design tool that allows designers to collaborate in real-time from anywhere in the world. With its advanced vector editing capabilities and powerful prototyping features, Figma is quickly becoming a favorite among designers who want to streamline their workflow and produce high-quality designs with ease.


4. Prefix-free

prefixfree
Image credit: prefixfree

This is a tiny client-side JavaScript library to make the vendor prefix problem go away. Both of these web apps are great places for testing browser support, playing with new CSS and creating test cases for browser bug reports. If you’re building sites out of OOCSS-style objects or abstracted patterns, you can put these tools to use by quickly mocking up and testing a pattern without having to worry about vendor prefixes, making ‘designing in the browser’ a much easier task. Vendor prefix tools

Vendor prefix has proved somewhat divisive, with many strongly worded articles recently taking sides on whether they’re essential or killing the web. Assuming that you’re taking a pragmatic view and using vendor prefixes responsibly, you’re already resigned to adding them for all supporting browsers and updating them as other browsers come online. There are several ways we can make this process less painful. If you’ve been using Dabblet or CodePen then you probably already have unprefixed CSS, and you could use a service such as Nettuts+ Prefixr or CSSPrefixer.

These enable you to paste in your CSS, then get it back with all the correct vendor prefixes. If you’re writing CSS by hand, your text editor may have a way of adding vendor prefixes to your code automatically. CSS pre-processors A CSS pre-processor is both the combination of a language that extends CSS with fun things such as variables, mixinis, nesting and math, and a way to monitor and convert this ‘extended’ CSS back into normal CSS.

As part of this conversion, the pre-processor also adds vendor prefixes automatically and can compress and concatenate your CSS and alert you to errors and so on too. CSS pre-processors are becoming more popular, no doubt in part due to the vendor prefix issue, plus a gradually lowering barrier to entry. While historically using one has involved some command line chops, recently apps have emerged that will handle this for you,


5. enjoycss.com

enjoycss
Image credit: enjoycss

With this CSS code generator you can easily create numerous graphic styles and immediately get their code or code of separate elements within seconds.


6. Trimage.org

trimage
Image credit: trimage

This is a cross-platform GUI and command-line interface to optimize image files via optipng, pngcrush, advpng and jpegoptim, depending on the filetype (currently, PNG and JPG files are supported). It was inspired by imageoptim. All image files are losslessy compressed on the highest available compression levels. Trimage gives you various input functions to fit your own workflow: A regular file dialog, dragging and dropping and various command-line options.


7. Spritepad

sketch
Image credit: sketch

Sketch.com is one of the best new design tools on the market. With its intuitive interface and powerful features, it has quickly become a favorite among designers and creatives alike. Whether you are creating logos, websites, or mobile apps, Sketch.com provides all the tools you need to make your vision a reality.


8. SpriteCow

spritecow
Image credit: spritecow

Sprite Cow helps you get the background-position, width and height of sprites within a sprite sheet as a nice bit of copyable css


9. PNGGauntlet

pnggauntlet
Image credit: pnggauntlet

PNG compression app for Windows. Uses PNGOUT, OptiPNG, and DeflOpt to create the smallest PNGs, without sacrificing any image quality.


10. PNGmini.com

pngmini
Image credit: pngmini

ImageAlpha converts 24-bit PNG to paletted 8-bit with full alpha channel. This greatly reduces file sizes with only a minor loss of quality. Such images are compatible with all browsers and even degrade well in IE6.


11. JPEGmini.com

jpegmini
Image credit: jpegmini

Your photos on a diet! Reduce the file size of your photos by up to 5x, while keeping their original quality and JPEG format! Icon Fonts


In conclusion, the best new design tools are a great way to help designers create beautiful, innovative work. They offer an array of features and functions that assist with creating, editing and sharing designs quickly and easily. The tools can be tailored to fit the user’s individual needs and preferences, making them incredibly versatile for any type of project. Designers should take advantage of these amazing tools to further their careers and create stunning work that stands out from the rest.

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