Fresh Resources for Web Designers and Developers (January 2014)

By Thoriq Firdaus. in Web Design. Updated on July 25, 2018.

Hey it’s a new year! Happy new year to all our readers and thanks for checking in on us for more fresh resources for designers. Like all our previous rounds, we have a few cool tools for you to try out in this compilation as well.

We have a couple of tools to help with typography, a jQuery plugin that sticks to the top of your web page no matter how far down your visitors scroll, and a personal assistant called Jarvis to help you navigate better in WP Admin and more. We hope you will find them useful. Let’s check them out.

Devdocs

Devdocs collects a number of API documentation (Docs) and present them in a more organized and easily-searchable way. At the time of the writing, it holds around 25 Docs including CSS, JavaScript, WordPress and jQuery. Want to include Docs that you frequently have to deal with? You can vote for it here.

Responsive Design Weekly

In 2012, Responsive Web Design was a huge hit that suddenly changed the way we build our websites. But the web design and development industry updates at a fast pace. If you want to keep up, better sign up for a newsletter in Responsive Design Weekly to receive the best articles, tips, and tutorials around RWD regularly.

Scut

Scut, which stands for Sass-CSS Utitilies, is a collection of reusable Sass mixins and functions to implement common web design pattern and layout with ease. These include for creating circle, triangle, box alignment, box positioning, and unit conversion.

Echo

Echo is a lightweight JavaScript (JS) library for image lazy-load. It allows us to load images on demand or only when they would be viewed. It is thus increase webpage load performance. Unlike other scripts that offer similar solutions, Echo is built purely on JS; it is not dependant on any third-party JS libraries.

Type Scale

Type Scale is a tool that you can use to find the perfect font scaling for your website. You can set the base font size, the scaling method, the preview text, the font family, and the font weight. And you can see the results immediately (how the sizing will look in paragraphs).

Font Combiner

Font Combiner is a great tool for anyone who is meticulous about typography matter. With it, you can set your own font specification such as the kerning, hinting, and spacing. You can also download the glyphs in PNG and SVG.

StickUp

stickUp is jQuery plugin to make elements stick to the top of the browser window. It makes “the element” visible while we scroll the page. It also comes with a feature called “One Pager”, which is very useful when you use it in a single page website. It will highlight the menu to show visitors where they are currently on.

Rocketeer

Jetpack is plugin that gives your blog a boost with a set of plugins. But it displays the plugins in a presentation that seems out place from the WordPress UI standard. It also makes activating and deactivating the plugins less intuitive. To fix this, Rockeeter will display the plugins in a list – like in the Plugins page.

Busted

The problem with using a cache plugin is that they do not update the changes of your files immediately, so you need to move to the browser to check the changes. If you encounter this problem, you can replace your cache plugin with Busted. It will refresh the browser cache for a file upon modification.

Jarvis

If you are a fan of Iron Man, you should know that Jarvis is his personal assistant who repeatedly saves his life. This Jarvis version can also be your personal assistant, but only in navigating through WordPress WP-Admin quickly.