Web Design inspiration

5 Great Web Design Resources

Top Resources for designing anything digital.

1 – Adobe Creative Suite

Adobe has long been setting the pace for aspiring and professional editors, designers, photographers and other creatives.

With each software update, developers introduce unexpected web design resources that immediately become industry-standard or rework existing solutions to make them more user-friendly.

Some of the most popular Adobe solutions are Photoshop, Premier, Illustrator, After Effects, Lightroom and many others.

Adobe XD is one of the most recent and most popular Adobe products for web designers.

This tool is used for vector design creation and wireframes modelling. It is continually being improved and regularly pleases its users with new features.

Adobe XD facilitates the tasks of prototyping, visual design, interactions, testing, and sharing by providing everything you need to design interfaces in a single solution.

These Adobe web design resources were created as a comprehensive user-interface design solution and were developed in collaboration with the professional UX designers community.

When creating the program, designers dealt with optimizing and improving user interaction with the product. Over 5 thousand designers contributed to Adobe XD as part of the pre-release program.

Significant advantages of Adobe XD

  • Numerous plugins
  • Voice prototyping
  • Auto-animate feature
  • The whole ecosystem of symbols/connected prototypes
  • Compatibility with After Effects, Sketch, Illustrator, etc
  • “Share for development” feature
  • Available for both macOS and Windows 10 users

2 – Sketch

Sketch is a vector editor that lets you focus entirely on an interface design. The tool has a large community and a vast number of third-party plugins.

Sketch features

  1. The tool allows you to create vector images and icons, retouch photos, and design websites.
  2. Sketch is developed for Mac OS.
  3. It has intuitive control and is easy to use.
  4. You should note that the program belongs to several ‘shareware’ web design resources, which expire after 30 days of a free trial.
  5. Sketch has a minimalistic interface and can work with fields of any size and any number of layers. Despite the extensive functionality, the tool is straightforward to use.

Its capabilities

  • Using simple tools, such as pencil or pen, inserting shapes, text or images
  • Painting objects in several layers
  • Setting the same style for a group of objects
  • Export of files in jpeg, png, tiff, pdf, svg formats
  • Constant updating
  • Storage of projects in the cloud

3 – Figma

Figma is one of the most popular graphic editors and web design tools.

You can hardly find an e-commerce development company or independent web design studio that does not utilise the tool daily.

With it, you can create:

  • Interactive prototypes of sites and mobile applications
  • Interface elements, like icons, buttons, menus, forms, etc
  • Vector illustrations

With Figma, all your work is stored in the cloud. Thus, you can work on different projects and share documents with your colleagues by reference without making them download every new version.

You can log in to Figma through your browser or download the app to your computer. It works with both Windows and macOS operating systems.

In the desktop version, you can also work offline. When the internet connection is back, all changes are synchronized.

The benefits of using Figma

So what are the most beneficial features of Figma, and why is it so popular:

  1. All your work is stored in the cloud. You do not need to upload and then send layouts or images – send a link.
  2. Teamwork. As in Google Docs, in Figma, several users can access viewing or editing, working on the layouts together with other team members, etc. This allows all project participants to understand the context better. For example, a designer develops a prototype of an application, and at the same time, a UX copywriter writes texts for the interface.
  3. The tool is free for individual users. To get access, you need to pass the registration and start working. Within a free plan, your team members can view but not edit files.

4 – InVision

InVision is a collaborative interface design platform.

With the help of InVision, both a small team and a large corporation get a powerful tool for developing a software product so that all stages can be seen and controlled by the developers, the company’s management, and even the client.

It is based on the philosophy of Agile development and breaking down all tasks into iterations and versions.

Only seven team members are responsible for the platform’s development and operation, while such market giants like Adobe, SAP, eBay are the stable platform’s clients.

InVision: key features

  • Working with a database of questions and tasks with the ability to notify the entire team or individual developers
  • Version and revision control within a single online platform
  • All technology for working with mockups and prototypes is built on iteration
  • The ability to develop and collaborate from any location, which is incredibly convenient for distributed and remote teams and employees
  • The ability to navigate by deadlines and stages of project readiness
  • Usage of cloud technologies and data protection technologies

5 – Google fonts

The font is essential. When designing a website, designers face the challenge of finding a beautiful and suitable font.

Google Fonts is one of the best web design resources, with an extensive collection of free fonts. They are regularly updated and support over 135 different languages.

Fonts are sorted by type, date added, etc. To nicely highlight the heading or other semantic parts of a text, Google Fonts has built-in support for CSS font effects.

You can use the fonts for free in both personal and commercial projects. Considering the licensing and pricing difficulties that most fonts have, Google Fonts is a real finding.

It would help if you decided which fonts would fit your website design best.

Final Thoughts

Every of the web design resources mentioned in the article deservedly ranks among the leaders in essential tools for a web designer.

Each one has its own merits, and each designer has the right to choose which solution or resource is most convenient for use and which one brings them more benefits.

Here’s more cool stuff

Read what's next.