A Designer’s Little Helpers
A list of useful tools, extensions and features from my bookmark bar to ease your day at work and beyond.
My co-workers recently asked me to show them some new tools and apps I use in my design workflow. So I thought I’d give them a quick look into one of my bookmark folders called «Helpers».
Only tiny «helpers» and nicely designed and reduced web apps find their way into this folder. As my colleagues found my «sneak peek» inspiring and useful I am sharing it here now.
Enjoy & thank you for some 👏 if you find any of this helpful.
The following list has no particular order.
copychar.cc
Copy special characters to your clipboard. A basic app that allows you to find and copy special characters to your clipboard. Also handy for a fast emoji selection workflow ; )
papersizes.io
A simple and free resource for finding the international standards for paper sizes.
Auto Scroll Bookmarklet
Simple bookmarklet to automatically scroll a web page to get “buttery smooth” screen captures for your next screencast or video.
Smallpdf
If you haven’t got the privilege of using Adobe’s Acrobat Pro — Smallpdf makes it super easy to convert and edit all your PDF files solving all your PDF problems in one place.
Scale
This is a wonderfully simple color scale generator. If you’re forced to create a chart color palette based on a branding color, or if you’re looking for nice additional colors to use in your next UI design this one is for you.
UI Faces
This app used to be much cleaner, but is still a nice place to go when searching for your next profile picture placeholders.
metatags.io
With the metatags.io web app you can edit, generate and preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and so on.
remove.bg
This one doesn’t need to be well designed to get into my list of little helpers. It will be your best friend when trying to easily remove a background from portrait or other people shots.
Grid Calculator
I know, a functionality like this exists also in all the current UI-design tools. But I have used this one for ages and no other calculator has reached the same simplicity and returns the same simple visual results like this, at least in my opinion. So I wanted to have it in the list as well. (Obviously, the design of that page has never changed for years either ; )
mailtolink.me
Yes, it’s not the most regular use case but when you need it, it’s super simple to generate the markup for mailto links.
Git Command Explorer
Helpful tool to find the right commands without digging through the web or stackoverflow.
JavaScript Array Explorer
If you are like me and not using JavaScript too often, I find this little helper quite useful.
contrast ratio
Handy to quickly see if your color combination will pass an accessibility test.
dimensions.guide
This tool hasn’t really been useful so far but if I ever need to know the dimensions of a “Stegosaurus”, I will definitely get back to it.
Let me know if you have any addition to this collection! Thx!
