Over the years I have been using a lot of online tools… and when switching to Brave browser, I noticed that my bookmarks needed a bit of cleaning up.
So I went through all the tools I had bookmarked and here are the winners (ie the ones I actually use regularly).
Brave
Not sure I can call Brave a tool, but I had to include it as I introduced it in the intro.
I found Chrome to be particularly RAM hungry on Macbook compared to Safari, but I couldn’t leave Chrome because of some extensions that I not available on Safari. When I heard about Brave, I decided to give it a try and I stuck with it.
Brave is based on Chromium, so it supports all the Chrome extensions, but Brave is also faster and better in privacy than Chrome. Plus you can receive a crypto called BAT (Brave Attention Tokens) by browsing the web. A nice bonus considering the amount of time I spend online.
Photopea
I like photography and I used to edit my photos with Photoshop and Lightroom, but since I switched to Luminar AI, I couldn’t justify Photoshop for basic edits related to my work (resizing images, editing backgrounds,…). Photopea is the perfect free online Photoshop “clone” and I use it daily. It’s impressive how good it compares to Photoshop considering that it’s free.
Canva
Not sure Canva still needs an introduction. If I had to keep only one tool on the list, that would be the one. I use this drag and drop graphic design tool to create anything from Facebook ads designs to whitepapers. I can’t even emphasize enough how much time Canva has saved me since I started using it, especially thanks to all the templates offered… a great starting point to get inspired.
Tinywow
This isn’t actually one tool, but more than 50 tools on a single webpage. The one I use the most is the background remover, which works great with not too complex images (and when it doesn’t work, I do it manually with Photopea). But the website also offers an impressive amount of format conversion tools (PDF to Word, WebP to JPG, SVG to PNG,…) and other useful features such as PDF e-signature, PDF compression or a Lorem Ipsum generator.
Unsplash / Pixabay / Pexels
I need a lot of stock images for work and I don’t really feel the need to pay a Shutterstock licence when there are so many free stock photos websites available. Unsplash is my favourite one when it comes to quality but its search function has let me down too often, so I like to use Pixabay and Pexels when I can’t find what I want on Unsplash. Pixabay is my top pick when I want an illustration rather than a photo.
To Unsplash // To Pixabay // To Pexels
Bootstrap Icons
When I create a website, I usually use WordPress + Elementor or WordPress + GeneratePress. In both cases, there are a bunch of icons included but like to have more options and Bootstrap Icons offers a nice collection of +1600 open source free icons.
Huemint / Coolors
These 2 colour palettes generators are particularly useful when designing brands or websites. You or the client might have 1 or 2 fixed colours to use, but a website, for example, will need 4 or 5 colours (for the CTAs, the buttons etc). We don’t all have perfect designers' eyes and it’s not always easy to find a combination of 5 colours that fit well together. That´s when these 2 tools come in handy as they generate colour palettes for you (you can lock as many colours as you want and their IA will generate the other colours).
Colour Wheel
The Colour Wheel is a complement to Huemint and Coolors. I like to use it to find the perfect colour for CTAs as it’s generally recommended that these should be on the opposite side of the colour wheel of our main colour. So I enter the Hex Code of my main colour, pick the “Complementary” colour combination and the tool gives me the colour on the opposite side. As easy as that.
Type-Scale
Another tool that I find particularly useful when creating websites. Type-Scale is a typographic scale calculator that gives you a consistent typography hierarchy based on your font (Google Fonts) and body text size (the base size) of choice. In other words, you select the font you want to use and the base size, then the tool generates the perfect sizes for the different headings while keeping the proportions.
Smash
I don’t use Smash so much for work, but more to share travel photos with my friends. Smash lets you share large files for free, with no size limits (there is a waiting queue for files above 2Go, but it’s not too long). So if I go on a trip with my camera and want to share the album with my friends, this comes really handy. The album auto deletes itself after 7 days and it keeps my iCloud clean.