Who doesn’t like free? This is one of the best things that I love about the open source community. Here are a few of the tools that I use to get things done and make my life easier, and they are free. Booyah! The following is a great article put together by the folks over at Creative Blog that highlights some of the awesome, free tools available to web designers to make their lives easier. Here are my favorites…
Font Awesome is indeed awesome: 634 (at the time of writing) icons contained within a single font, constituting “a pictographic language of web-related actions”. Icons are scalable, so they look the same at any size, and you can style them with CSS. It works well with all frameworks and screenreaders and doesn’t require JavaScript.
Since it was launched by Twitter in 2011, web building framework Bootstrap has become one of the most popular project on GitHub. As Bootstrap grew, its creators Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton decided to move it to its own open source organisation, and the project separated from Twitter.
Bootstrap has a small footprint, LESS integration and compelling visual design. There is a web-based customiser that you can use to tailor it to your open source project: components and jQuery plug-ins can be added or removed by ticking check boxes, and variables can be customized using a web form. There’s a 12-column responsive grid, typography, form controls and it uses responsive CSS to work with mobile browsers.
Expo is a showcase of the most “beautiful and inspiring” projects built with the toolkit.
The Accessibility Project is a community-driven effort to make web accessibility easier for frontend designers and developers to understand and adopt into a daily workflow.
The project started in mid-January 2013 amid developer sentiment that core accessibility concepts, features and code examples are overly difficult to extract.
Today 75 people have contributed to The Accessibility Project and it has become an invaluable resource for any developer looking to improve their knowledge.
Grunt allows you to automate common tasks using JavaScript. You can perform mundane, repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing and linting with almost zero effort. And because Grunt is extensible, if someone hasn’t already built what you need, you can easily author and publish your own Grunt plug-in.
Grunt has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for web developers by providing a common interface for the tasks in their build process. The extensive plug-in ecosystem and easy configuration format makes it possible for anyone on the team to create a modern build process – designers included.
