The creation of a responsive website needs a perfect arrangement of elements without compromising with the design, and it is a tough job. There have emerged a number of devices that are able to get access to internet, thus, a website should be such that it can be viewed easily on every device. This increase in the number of devices has raised the need of tools for creating a website highly responsive on any device that it is viewed on. However, there are several tools available that provide an easy approach to this task, out of which a few useful tools that have gained hype among developers.
Here is a collection of around 12 responsive webdesign tools that can help you in your next web design project. All these tools which are listed here are linked to their official website.
Bootstrap
Twitter designers have built Bootstrap for providing a painless and easy prototyping service. This tool imparts a great look and behavior for websites in desktop browsers as well as Smartphone and tablet browsers. It has a 12-column responsive grid combined with dozen components, plugins, options for form control and typography along with a web-based customizer.
Adobe edge Reflow
This is a new tool released from Adobe, this new tool is expected to become a favorite tool for web designers for creating responsive designs. This tool focuses on the handling of responsive layouts rather than the editing of graphics that photoshop focuses on. Grid systems, generation of advanced CSS layouts and media query handling are some of the tasks for which this system is used.
Retina Images
This tool serves the website viewer with images based on the device on which the site is being viewed. This easy-to-setup system helps view high-resolution images on retina displays that have attributes of height and width associated with them.
Responsinator
Responsinator is a testing tool that helps website designers preview the responsive site that they created on some popular devices. This tool helps you to preview the response of their web page like how it loads in both landscape and portrait modes on various mobile devices.
Categorizr
This is a PHP script that is used in a responsive website to help detect the device of the viewer from pre-defined categories. It provides the website a device-specific design and is a perfect solution for hybrid responsive websites.
Foundation
The foundation tool is another front-end tool that acts as an open source framework. This tool also uses a 12-column grid that is flexible and scalable and works on almost all types of devices. It provides a high-level customization and creativity with various plugins and elements supporting offsets, nesting, device presentation and source-ordering.
Adaptive Images
Adaptive images are used for automatic adjustment of HTML images according to the screen size of the visitor of the website. Without the need of any markup changes, default customization values can also be customized simply by following three steps. The process to rescale an image is done by reading the size of a viewer’s screen and using libraries that are easily available through Apache and other hosts supporting PHP.
Wirefy
Built with a 16-column grid, this exceptionally adaptable and flexible tool allows quick experiments with wireframes of the responsive websites. This tool offers some standard options and UI elements to help you focus on the content of your website. This tool helps you present your content in an elegant and structured content. These wireframes are fully functional and can also be used to show the responsive layout of the website to the clients.
Gridset
Gridset is an easy to use tool that helps in the design of responsive and customized grid layouts. This tool can be used to create any grid layout ranging from simplest ones to the complex ones, without the hassle of calculations and measurements. In addition, these grids can be saved for future use and can also be shared with other colleagues that adds an exception to the prototyping and wireframing tools available.
FitText
This tool is a jQuery plugin that helps in making the font size compatible with the responsive layout by automatically resizing the font size according to the parent element’s width. It helps for an optimal display of text on different devices by making headlines more responsive. This simple plugin lets you add more creativity to your responsive website design.
RWD Calculator
RWD (Responsive Web Design) calculator is an easy-to-use tool that can be used with a photoshop document to help you with the responsive design by converting pixels into percentages. This makes the calculation of PSD’s size easier while viewing it on a responsive website, preventing a designer from various hassles in the beginning stages of development of a responsive web design. Even in its beta version, this tool is a free to use tool to explore the details of the pixel design of a photoshop document.
Simple Grid
This tool proves to be an efficient tool while exploring the list of tools available for designing a responsive website. Due to an ease of usability and access to full control, thousands of developers working on responsive websites prefer this tool. With this tool, a designer is able to simplify the tasks of designing a responsive website without the hassle of complicated coding. It simplifies the view of every element on a web page by fitting it exactly on a single page in the browser, without the hassle of any horizontal bar to scroll and view the complete image or any other element.
With a variety of tools available for RWD, choice of the best is a vital task. You can test the above mentioned tools and benefit from them while designing a responsive website hassle-free.
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