Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

Flash and ActionScript 3.0 user interface components can take lots of time to create, so why not use some ready-made, open source starter components, like the ones on MinimalComps.com ? The components on this site are lightweight, but extremely small and easy to use. In fact, the site is created purely with Minimal Components and comes in at about 60kb for the whole site! Choose from sliders, calendars, bar charts, numeric steppers, draggable windows, VSliders, HSliders, text areas, knobs and more. You can find more info on MinimalComps on Keith Peters’ blog at Bit-101.com.

If you need a simple yet versatile FTP program, give Cyberducka try. This Open Source FTP program also handles FTP/TLS (FTP secured over SSL/TLS), SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer), WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning), Amazon S3, Google Storage, Google Docs, Windows Azure and Rackspace Cloud Files. Works with open cloud software from Eucalyptus and OpenStack. You can basically upload, download and synchronize anything from any server.

You can edit any text or binary file on the server in your preferred application, configure CloudFront and Rackspace to distribute your files, browse your Amazon S3 account like your hard disk, convert uploads to Google Docs format and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for image uploads. It also has bookmarking capabilities, advanced SSH features and supports Growl and Mac’s Keychain.

One of the quickest way to come up with the right colors is to use ColorPicker. Simple, but with all the necessary features, it has hex input, a color slider and the ability to save colors to a palette. You can also choose from generated palettes with complementary, triade, tetrade and analogic colors. The only thing that may make this tool even better would be to add the ability to change the background color of the page itself.

Another free tool by the creator of Colorzilla is the Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator, an online tool that easily lets you create and customize your own designs, or the given presets and will output cross-browser HTML5 / CSS3 gradients (an HTML5 feature) without you having to create images as repeating backgrounds. With the gradient editor control you can add and remove stops, change color and position etc. You can edit the size (great for nav bars and backgrounds) and preview the results and copy and paste the generated CSS into your stylesheet.

Useful for all kinds of color tasks that may otherwise require several programs, Colorzilla puts a lot of tools useful for web designers into a simple to use extension for Firefox. Get color readings that you can then adjust and paste into other programs, measure distance between two points on a page, choose from pre-defined color sets and save the most used colors in custom palettes. You can also get info about DOM elements with the DOM spying feature. All in all, it’s a useful eyedropper tool, color picker and palette viewer that’s always ready to go right from your browser.

Get a free .psd file every day for a year. The website invites designers to give their unused graphics a second life and give them away for free at 356psd.com. You’ll find buttons, arrows, icons, progress bars and more searchable by tags. The site doesn’t state what happens when the year is over…

Confused by which browsers support which features of HTML5 and CSS3? Find Me By IP offers a browser compatibility chart for CSS3 properties and selectors and HTML5 web applications, audio and video codecs and form attributes. Their What’s My IP feature also shows what ‘advanced’ features your own browser supports.

Many mobile service providers from around the world offer free e-mail to SMS service (receiver may still be charged). For a list of companies that will allow you to send free SMS from your web applications visit Uptime Robot. It’s not always possible to get internet access to check e-mails, but you can receive an SMS anywhere you can make a call on a cell phone.

If you’re stuck with your design project and you need to step back and get the big picture, take a look at I Believe in Advertising. It’s a blog with an ongoing list of advertising campaigns from around the world.

See how creative teams come up with yet another clever ad for pest control, cars or household cleaners. The creativity out there is mind boggling! If you’re currently working on a campaign you can submit your own project for inclusion on the site.

Advertising Agency: DraftFCB, Jakarta, Indonesia
Creative Director: Widyalupi Nonis
Art Directors: Defitriadi, Ridward Ongsano
Copywriter: Indah Larasati
DI Artist: Defitriadi
Photographer: Budi Han

The saying “if you need to ‘see’ something, look at something else” really holds true when it comes to design inspiration. Dan Lockton is now offering a new version of his free design kit ‘Design with Intent’. The kit includes “101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design”, a set of 101 cards, “each illustrating a particular ‘gambit‘ for influencing people’s interactions with products, services, environments, and each other, via the design of systems.” They’re grouped into 8 easy to work with disciplines like ‘architecture’ with examples on what will bring about a behavioral change through design. You can download a corresponding worksheet with each card. Beautifully done!

(This tip was first seen on Mister Wong!)