Handy Tools For Making A Website: Round Two
It’s been a long time coming, but this is the very belated second part of the Handy Tools For Making A Website series. In this edition, I am going to write about colour resources and image generators.
Colour Palettes
One of the first things you will need for designing is an idea for a colour scheme. Google “color palettes” and you can find all sorts of sites with palette generators and pre-made palettes. Sites like ColourLovers and Kuler allow you to see palettes of five colours, and how they work with - or against - each other. ColourLovers also has a neat feature where you can make many, many background images from your palettes.
Stripe Generators
Stripes are a very popular background these days, and they can range from thin to thick, bright to bland. Whatever your choice is, making repeating stripe backgrounds (or at least the ones that are of a diagonal) can be a difficult task indeed. So instead of taking the time to make a stripe - only to see that it looks horrible - simply input your colours and your widths and see instantly how it looks!
Of all the sites I could recommend StripeGenerator.com is probably the most popular, and in my opinion the best.
Tabs Generators
Tabs are a common way of making site navigation, but they can be fiendishly difficult to create. But once again there are ways of creating them without spending ages in Photoshop or the GIMP. You can stay online and use TabsGenerator.com (by the same people of StripeGenerator.com) or you can download CSS Tab Designer.
80×15 Button Generators
We’ve all seen those tiny pixel buttons, like over at Steal These Buttons, and there are plenty of generators out there that make them. Adjust the colours, the position of the divider, and the text. Adam Kalsey’s button maker is simple and clean, while micro.button-banner.com has the added function of adding tiny icons to the button.
Favicon Generators
Favicons are useful little things, but the problem can be making them, or making the .ico filetype. There are two main types of generators for favicons. One: those that allow you to draw the image on the screen using pixel art, such as Favicon.cc or Degraeve.com’s generator. Two: Sites that allow you to upload a pre-designed (square) image and converts it to the standard 16×16 .ico file, like Favicongenerator.com or Web Script Lab.
As I said in the previous entry, designing websites is kind of like cooking. The previous entry was the measuring bowl and other equipment; this entry is only some of the ingredients. Next up: more ingredients.
Originally published at Disdainful-Soul.net. You can comment here or there.