What's in my 2025 toolkit?

Dear First name / creative,

 

How are you spending the first few weeks of the new year? As for me, I'm taking these quiet moments as an opportunity to revisit my goals and rethink my workflows. Nothing too drastic— sometimes it's the slightest shifts in the way I do things that make such a huge impact in my studio.

 

For instance, I've been thinking about the small, repetitive tasks that we undertake as web designers and developers. They may seem simple, but they take us away from the work that we do best: conceptualizing, orchestrating, creating. The very thought of losing precious hours to these trifling tasks inspired me to take matters into my own hands.

 

Here are some of the free tools I've built especially for web designers so you, too, can streamline your own process:

 

1.1 PixResize does what it says on the label, versatile enough to manipulate a number of image file formats.

If the page speed of your website build is in the red, chances are your client's large images might be the culprit. They're richly immersive pieces that show what their brand is made of. But we don't need to render every pixel of that picture in the corner of one homepage section, do we?

 

Optimizing images can make or break your website. This doesn't make the task any less laborious. It takes far too many clicks to process them on Photoshop, and what if not everyone on your team has an Adobe subscription anyway?

I ran into these issues myself. No wonder I made my own easy, ad-free alternative—another wonderful addition to your web designer toolbox. Free for you and your clients to use!

 

Which comes first: the copy or the design?

 

This has always been the question for many designers when they're trying to secure brand assets before project kickoff. In as much as we'd like our client to be prepared with the website copy, some of them might not even realize that they needed to hire a copywriter—or draft it themselves.

 

Rather than risk delaying the entire project, we can bridge the gap with a useful placeholder for the meantime. Enter Copyspark, a nifty tool that generates prompts to fill the blank webpage. Think of this as a starting point for content, something to brief a copywriter as they lend their invaluable insights and work out the finer details of brand voice.

2.1 CopySpark can recommend pages and sections for your website based on your client's business needs.

Font pairing is such a fascinating way to leave a signature touch of your client's brand on every webpage. This is a choice often made early on in the branding phase, so as a web designer you'd ideally refer to their existing font foundry. Unfortunately, you won't find most of these handpicked typefaces in your website builder of choice.

 

Installing these custom fonts can be tedious—a task I knew could be handled swiftly with the right tool. I didn't find one that suited my needs, so I created one myself to generate your CSS snippet in minutes. Hopefully you'd find as much utility in FontWiz as I did.

3.1 FontWiz requires only your font file path, font name, font format, and element to which it applies.

Which one of these is your favorite by far? Crafting these items for my web designer toolkit has been such a delight. I'd love to know if you've hit a similar snag in your own workflow and if we can work towards a solution together.

 

 

From my studio to yours,