Color Rotate
Web www.colorotate.org
Price Free/$9 for Photoshop plug-in
Coming up with a colour scheme for sites that’s both coherent and individual can be lot harder than it might first appear. Color Rotate gives you a chance to look at the problem in three dimensions (“The same way as your brain”, apparently).Whether that claim can be justified or not, Color Rotate is a nice thing to play around with. Producing palettes of up to 16 hues in pretty much any colour format is simple. And the 3D viewer quickly makes sense, giving you an intuitive grasp of how your choices relate to one another.
CSS 3.0 Maker
Web www.css3maker.com
Price Free
The visual goodness that CSS3 represents has patchy coverage. Some of it works on iPhones, some only on the latest browsers, and occasionally everyone pulls together to give some decent cross-platform support. CSS 3.0 Maker gives you a resource for trying out these new effects and getting reliable code to use, but also discovering where your visual concoction is going to work. The controls are all straightforward slider-based affairs and code is just copy and paste.
Font Spring
Web www.fontspring.com
Price Per font
Using custom typography on the web is a tantalising prospect, but not everyone wants to pay a subscription and have their typefaces hosted on third-party servers. Font Spring charges a one-off fee for unlimited use and enables you to download and host the fonts yourself.
It’s a web-focused clearing house for type designers, and has listings for a huge number of foundries. If you don’t want to limit the number of domains or page views your (§font-face installations can serve, then this is your solution.
Tags: resources, web design, web designers
