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How to deal with helpful tools for responsive web design

Posted: 29 Aug 2013 07:49 PM PDT

Web designers and developers use responsive web design to provide different layouts for specific devices offering site visitors an incredible user experience. When you create a responsive design, you should be careful that it will not alter the looks of your website when viewed from different devices and screen sizes. When designing a responsive website, there are a number of different tools that help you to achieve what you want out of your responsive web design. Here are some of the great responsive web design tools that you could try for yourself.

Adobe Edge Inspect

When you are thinking of how your web site would appear across different platforms and screen sizes, Adobe Edge Inspect would be a perfect tool to do that. Previously known as Adobe Shadow, this one offers quick preview of your responsive site as it would appear on different hand-held platforms on one mobile device alone. This means you don't have to scatter these devices on your table just to test the appearance of the site on these different devices.

Adaptive Images

When your site is being accessed on smaller, slower and low bandwidth devices, your desktop-centric images take more time to load which causes website lagging and cost you and your site visitors un-necessary bandwidth and money. This is where Adaptive Images come into use. This tool automatically detects the screen size of your visitor's device and delivers rescaled version of your HTML images that fit into that screen.

Twitter Bootstrap

Initially designed for social networking platforms like Twitter, this tool is compatible across all major browsers. It invites web designers to participate and make contributions to the project. It is an open source tool which is managed through GitHub. Bootstrap functions at its best even when viewed from hand-held platforms such as tablets and smartphones without requiring you to alter your layout with every new screen width that you are designing for.

Retina Images

Retina images are a tool that serves different images on your responsive website as they are being accessed via different hand-held platforms with different screen sizes. For instance, if you want to access a particular image on your website, Retina Images check for a couple of resolution conditions such as value sets in cookies so as to decide the quality of image to be delivered. If all conditions are satisfied, then Retina Images will deliver high resolution images or else, only normal resolution of that particular image. All these work in a matter of seconds.

SimpleGrid

This is yet another helpful tool that enables hassle-free viewing of a traditional website on different mobile devices. With SimpleGrid, it is possible to view every single element of that particular page on one single screen and no horizontal scroll bars are required.

Foundation

Foundation is an awesome tool for designing responsive websites. This tool allows you to design for smaller devices first and as the screen size gets larger and larger, you can add more complex codes to make your site compatible on larger screens. Another interesting feature about this tool is that it's lightweight speeds up the loading time thus saving your time and effort.

Resize My Browser

Resize my browser is a great tool that allows you to test your responsive web design on different screen resolutions. This tool has a preset sizes for devices such as the iphone, ipad, laptops, netbooks, and different screen resolutions as well as the ability to mention your own. All you have to do is click on the required size and you get a preview of your website. Also, the tool allows you to include or exclude the tool bars, scrollbars, etc.

RWD Calculator

Although the functions of a RWD calculator are similar to those of a simple calculator, this simple tool turns PSD pixels into percentage format thus saving your time and effort in calculation.

Responsive web design sketch sheets

Whether you are a logo designer, font designer or web developer, responsive Sketch sheets serve you as a one-stop solution for all your sketch sheet needs. Your code should not restrict you from viewing your layouts on different screen sizes. These sketch sheets will give you a better view of how your sites appear across different platforms before you dive into the code.

Lettering.js

Lettering.js is a jQuery plugin that allows web developer and designers to play and experiment more with typography. This plugin allows targeting specific letters, words or lines within an element without losing control over typography. It can be used in your headings, Asides, Block quotes, etc.

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