In this article we gonna share a list of 29 Free Web Design Tools, You Should Know. Every web designer, freelancer, or bootstrap startup should know and bookmark these free design tools.
We’ve worked on a lot of big web projects. Some have been so large that I’ve barely scratched the surface. But one thing is common across all of them: they were all created with a collection of free design tools.
Overview
You’ll be amazed by what you can do with all of these tools, without paying a single penny. And the best part is they’re all tools that you can use legally for any of your projects. They are not some black hat stuff or illegal downloads.
You may know some of these tools and in case you know about any other tool that is not mentioned in this article, feel free to leave a comment down below and let the world know.
List of Free Web Design Tools
Haven’t you heard? Free is the new price! That applies to everything from operating systems, cloud storage, and email services to web design tools. From this list, you can create a logo, mockup a product, build a website and even create high converting landing pages. Here are the best free web design tools you should know about.
1. Flaticon
The first is FLATICON and it’s one of my favorite free web design tools. It has over 6.1 million vector icons and stickers, and it is growing by the day. You can literally search for anything like food, guitar, wedding, or basically anything on this website.
And it probably has some vector icons for you to use on your projects or website. For most of these icons and stickers, you can download them for free in PNG format.
But if you wanna scale this icon up into a bigger size without losing quality, you’ll probably need a premium account to download the SVG format of the file. But either way, it is not likely you are needing it in the poster size for web projects, the PNG version is sufficient.
The best free web design tool if you are looking for royalty-free icons, and you can use them to make edits that match your site or project, as you can see over here. So flat icon is definitely worth checking out.
Also read: Top 12 Best eCommerce Marketing Tools For Growth
2. The Noun Project
The noun project is another best free web design tool for you to download icons. It has a huge range of 3 million icons. Everything you need under the sun probably has an icon for you to download. Like for example “yoga” has over 3,500 icons, 120 icon collections, 537 photos.
But the downside is if you’d like one of the icons, you’ve gotta create an account to pay for the royalty-free license. But the upside is that you can still use the icons under the creative commons license, which means you have to credit the creditor of the icon.
but still, it is one of the greatest free web design tools for you to find inspiration if you are going to design your own.
3. Lordicon
If you have design skills you need this design tool, the lordicon is another place to download vector icons, but it takes a steel icon to another level by animating them. Currently, it has over 2000 animated icons, 340 of them are free to use, but free ones are awesome as well.
You can click on the icon, choose the color scheme that matches your site or project. And then you can download them by selecting the format you want. So let’s say that as you select WebP, you can choose if you want the background color of the icon to be a solid color or a transparent background, which is super handy for any project.
When you’re done with the edits, just download it to your computer and you can put it anywhere on your site. I love this cool website. What do you think?
4. Freeillustrations
This is a cool web design tool, as it is a consolidation of websites that offer free illustrations. You can browse by the file type and if you like a specific type of illustration. These are hand-drawn illustrations, and if you want any of this, you can click on either a PNG or SVG and then you can save this to your computer.
So this free illustration site does not provide you with illustrations, but it is rather a directory for you to find websites where you can download awesome illustrations.
5. Namelix
Let’s talk about something else, and then we’ll go back to illustrations because we’ve something else. If you are looking for inspiration for a cool-looking logo for your site or brand try Namelix. An AI-powered business name generator that would not only help you generate brand name ideas, but also give you a ton of logo, design inspiration if you are into web design you should bookmark this free web design tool.
An entire business branding can be generated including fonts and color palettes of one of these cool designs. So if you ever have a roadblock as to what to name your product or project, you now have a powerful tool to assist you.
Personally. I’ve used this site to buy a couple of awesome domain names under seven characters, which is super rare as days, but you gotta be patient to find one that suits your business.
6. Coolors
Now talking about color palettes coolers is one of the tools I love to use to mix and match colors or generate color palettes for my web projects. You can start the color generator, or if you wanna check out what are the trend palettes, you can just click on this and it will show you a bunch of color palettes for your project.
As for the generator, If you have a particular color that is finalized you can lock the color and hit the space bar for you to generate another set of colors until you find another color that you think matches your primary color, and then you can log that and you can continue with the generator.
It is a simple, but yet powerful free web design tool. In my opinion, once done, you can use the color codes for your website or any project. This is an awesome tool for web designers.
Also read: 10 Tips to Drive Traffic from Pinterest to Your Website
7. khroma.co
Khroma is another free web design tool. You need to start by selecting 50 colors, and then you would train its AI algorithm to generate a whole bunch of color references in text in posters, gradient images, and pallets.
To me, this is super useful when it comes to designing the elements of the website. Because it gives you a visual representation of the color combination with elements. If you like any color combinations, you can click on an icon and it will show you all the information on the colors used.
You can even click on this hard icon to keep it as your favorite, and then you can favor it as many as you like. And if you click on this, you can view your selection later to decide on the color palettes you want to use. This is such a handy tool and the best thing is you don’t even need to create an account.
8. Colorbook
Colorbook is an excellent free web design tool and not only does it generate color schemes for you, but It will also tell you if a particular color is suitable or not on certain elements of your website.
For example, if I enter a color code and hit convert, this will give you the information on color. And as you scroll down, you will see if this color is recommended for text heading few colors, which is the background, color, and buttons.
I mean, if you are totally new to web design, this is probably the best free web design tool for you to find the best color combination. It has a color scheme generator, as well as you click on this generate new color scheme, it will give you a primary color, secondary color, and tertiary color.
And if you scroll down further, you will have a visual representation of how the color schemes work on your site. For me, I will usually zoom out from this page so that I don’t have to scroll down. Every time I generate a new color scheme, this is a much faster approach to finding the right colors for your website or projects
9. Colorfont (chrome extension)
Ever gone to a website and taught yourself, wow, this is a nice design. What fonts are they using? And what color combination is that? Well, this Chrome extension does just that.
Once you have started your Chrome browser, whenever you visit a website, all you need is to click on this icon, make sure you pin this to your browser. Then you’ll select the color picker and hover to the section or click on it and it will tell you the color code of that section. It is a free Chrome extension with pro features, but we have only explored all free features.
10. Whatfont
This is another Chrome extension that’s a great arsenal for your free web design tools. Whatfont tells you what font a website is using. Once you have installed this Chrome extension and you pin it here, whenever you visit a website and you wanna know what font it is using, just click on this hover to the text, click on it.
And it will tell you all the information about the font, like the style, if it is italic, bow, or normal, the weights of the font, the size, the vertical spaces of the text, and its color code. And when you wanna stop using this extension, click on the icon again, and it will shut down.
11. Dafont
Speaking about fonts, dafont is a library of fonts that you can download and use for your projects. No design is complete with proper font, reason why we have placed Dafont in this list of free web design tools.
If you have Photoshop or any designing tools, you can use the downloaded fonts on design platform, or you can even convert the downloaded font into a web open font format and upload it to your website and host it locally.
As you can see, there are so many fonts available, nested under all these categories, you would definitely be spoiled by choice.
12. Blush
This tool is amazing because you can customize your illustrations. For example, let’s say that I need an illustration for a finance block. So, I will select finance and these are all the illustrations.
Some illustrations are only for pro users, but a lot of them are free. It’s very simple to customize any illustration, pick one illustration, and to customize simply click the WYSIWYG editor. And you can edit the entire vector in just a few clicks.
You change the color and style of elements e.g. mustache, upper body, expressions, hairstyle, accessories, and facial hair.
13. unDraw
A tool that is helpful to you and another great place to get royalty-free illustrations. You can define the color tone of the illustrations, and there are so or many to choose from. I’m pretty sure whatever you search for here, they will have something for you.
They also have a small library of handcrafted elements, which is really cool and you can even use these illustrations directly in popular designing tools. This is really a cool website to check out and you must bookmark this site in “free web design tools“.
If you go directly to the website, you may not know what exactly it is all about, but if you just click on browse now, it will bring you to the illustrations.
Also read: Complete Guide to Start an Online Store
14. PIXLR
Don’t have Adobe Photoshop, no problem. Now you have a free photo editor that works similar to Photoshop and the best thing is it’s web-based and FREE. You don’t need to install any software on your computer as it’s all cloud-based!
If you looking for a free alternative to Photoshop, Pixlr is one the best photo editors out there that allow you to create high-quality images.
you can find everything that you get in Photoshop like crop, pen, masking, lasso, adjustments, filters, etc. It is an incredible free design tool. I like editing photos on my computer, but I hate the fact that once I’ve installed it, I am stuck with it.
So basically if you get tired of it or want to try something new you have to uninstall the old program and install a new one. Not anymore with PIXLR, you can stay in sync as you switch from your computer to your mobile device!
15. answerthepublic
As a web designer, your task is not only about web designing. You also gotta understand a little about keyword research, search intent, and SEO. So, that will stand you out from just being a web designer.
Your clients will appreciate your work more If you understand their intentions of having that website and you optimize so user experience based on the intention and focus.
So to start researching keywords, you can use “answer the public” put in a topic, brand, or product, and it will give you a bunch of keyword ideas to use in your content.
People are searching for related to the info you’ve entered from there. You can understand the business a little bit more and you can build web designs geared towards the functionality and purpose of the website answer.
16. answersocrates
Answersocrates is another tool that allows people to search for questions and get an answer. People ask a question, and the answers help show their intention.
Click on their website, search for the keywords and find out what do the customers want. As mentioned before this keyword can be put back on the website by answering questions for your potential customers.
A powerful keyword research tool that will help you get more customer interaction. It’s the one-stop-shop for everything you need when it comes to keywords. Help your local business improve its search engine rankings and get more customers in the door.
17. Pexels
Most of you should know about pixels because it is the best place to get high-quality & royalty-free stock images. Anything you can think of, there’ll probably be a photo that will suit your purpose.
The images you download are super high quality, and they can go up 5,000 pixels in width.
Downloaded images are super clear and they even have a library of videos you can download for free and they are royalty-free. I can’t think of any place better than this to download free and high-quality digital assets.
18. compressor.io
Now, we got free stock images it’s time to add an image compression tool to our free web design tool bookmark. So we have compressor.io, which is an awesome tool to optimize images for the web.
You can optimize several formats of images efficiently, and you can either choose lossily that compressed the full size of the image down to the minimum, but the quality of the image may suffer, or you can select lossless where the image quality will be intact, but the foul size may be larger.
Compressor.io is a handy tool for you to optimize your images so that your website will load faster.
19. TinyPNG
TinyPNG is my favorite free web design tool, the main reason I use TinyPNG is to reduce the file size of all my JPAC PNG images. In most cases, you can reduce your image file up to 5-10% without any noticeable loss in quality.
You do not have control over the lossy or lossless compression, but it does the job well to reduce the foul size and keep the quality of your images. We all know that PNG is a format of raster graphics that is excellent in lossless compression.
It reduces the file size while still retaining the original quality. However, it comes with large files, and websites might have lots of large images on them. TinyPNG will reduce the file size of your PNG & JPEG images without altering their quality, and make your website load fast.
20. CloudConvert
Cloud convert is a powerful web design tool with this tool, you can convert +200 files formats Supported. The best part of this tool is that you can convert a ton of file formats from videos to vectors, to images, fonts, and all these formats.
This is insanely powerful, what you can do with compressor.io or TinyPNG. You can do this using cloud convert, you can optimize JPEG and PNG and a lot of other useful tools as well. It is like an all-in-one solution for file conversion and compression.
21. keyframes.app
keyframes app is an awesome tool to create animations for any elements of your webpage. Keyframes is a fast and easy-to-use web-based tool for creating animations with CSS. Just as with video editing software, it allows you to visually produce and edit animations, but with CSS.
Produce @keyframes animations for single or multiple elements (just like CSS animations), create 3D box shadows just by moving a few sliders, or generate animated gradients with automatic color palettes. You can also save your work and come back to it later if you wish, or transform a previously created animation into an image that you can use anywhere.
22. Blisk
You can test your web page responsiveness all at once on over 50 devices that are integrated with BLISK, from mobiles to tablets, to laptops and desktops. So this is definitely a very handy tool.
Have you ever wondered why a specific web page is not loading on your mobile device? It might be because something is going on wrong with the code. BLISK is an error monitoring tool that comes with several powerful reporting and development tools.
All you have to do is turn it on and each time you open a new web page, Blisk will monitor JavaScript errors and resources that failed to load on that page. These results are included in each report generated by Blisk.
23. Design Inspirations
Design Inspiration is everywhere around us. Some of the best designs and creativity can be found in art, furniture, and architecture. I’ve created a list of my favorite sites that are full of design inspiration for your next project or creation. All you need to do is pick which one fits your needs (or mashup a couple of them) and start rocking with ideas!
- awwwards.com – Hundreds of custom web design templates can be found in the Awards
- dribbble.com – Designers share their original work, get feedback from the community and collaborate.
- designspiration.com – The inspiration for your next design project is just a click away!
- behance – Behance is the world’s largest creative network for showcasing and discovering creative work.
- godly.website – Browse the best eCommerce websites, portfolio websites, animation websites and more.
- siteinspire – SiteInspire is a showcase of the best web design inspirations
With all these places to take reference from you shouldn’t have any issues coming up with awesome designs of your own.
Conclusion
Web Design is a vast subject, and that’s why these free web design tools will help you rapidly speed up your website design creation. As you’ve seen there are plenty of essential categories to choose from when it comes to web design tools. All of them have their own specific purpose and they can easily be integrated into your workflow.
We hope we have replaced some of your paid apps with a free alternative. This list of web design tools you should know is constantly evolving. If you think that we have missed out on any must-know web design tool which is free, then do let us know in the comments section below.