Web designers and graphic designers in general constantly need a stream of new ideas and creative input to keep their work fresh and lively. The good ones also learn to be highly efficient in their work because clients and a regular paycheck demand it.

I’m always on the lookout for little tools and tricks to make my life as a web designer easier. Below you’ll find a smattering of some that make my work go faster and creativity come more easily to me:

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I’m always on the lookout for new ways to tweak CSS for design purposes. The more you can rely on CSS to drive layout, versus images, tables, etc. the faster your site is going to load and the more you’ll distinguish your site from others.

Mandarin Design is one such site that is pushing the CSS envelope. An exploration of their site reveals a whole shebang of excellent tips, tricks, design ideas and style guidelines. I haven’t come close to checking everything out, but here are a couple of notable articles:

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Google has a calculator built into it’s search engine. I never knew that. If you type “meters in mile” for example, it will give you the answer. You can also type typical math problems such as (2*4)+9 and the answer will appear.

You can also ask it to return definitions. Type “define: google” for example, and you get the answer. It appears as though a “:” is mandatory to see the results in the “definition” format.

Because I use firefox browser I always have the google seach bar on my browser … so I doubt I will “reach” for start/programs/accessories/calculator much in the future … and I never did reach for the dictionary, just ask my teachers.

This is a very neat on-line utility for splitting images. It will build the mouseovers even. It will only work with proportional images needing splitting, but if you only do one every once in a while it might work well for you.

This little on-line utility will help you build a favicon. You can build one manually if you wish using irfanview and your image editor, but if you don’t need a lot of control, give this a try.

Well today I was working on a css rollover menu with Franki. We as usual got off topic and were comparing WeetBix to Frosted Mini Wheats. In looking at the Mini-Wheats site they had drop down menus with little bullets (more…)

Find a missing font by answering a few questions. The bigger the sample you have, the more likely you are to find what you are looking for. Hint, if you don’t know say you don’t.