5 Friendly Tools for Effortless Responsive Design

Responsive web design, as of 2015, is gaining traction at blindingly fast speed. Every client is hankering for a mobile-friendly, fully responsive website.

So, now that there’s demand, designers and developers are collectively striving to supply. It’s not just economics at work. It’s being foresighted and adaptable. With Internet of Things, being responsive will soon be the first thing that matters for any website.

Thankfully, for now, we have to make do with getting responsive on tablets, phones, and PCs/laptops. Although any designer will tell you that even that is tricky enough.

…Which is why we enlisted these 5 tools for help:

1.    Interface Sketch

This is as simple as you can possibly get.

Interface Sketch offers free sketch templates for mobile and tablet platforms: great for use in any client presentation. They’re all free (always great) and can be downloaded in PDF formats.

They also make for great basis for basic mockup designing. Print them out and take a pencil to it; after all the hours spent on Photoshop and Bootstrap, that will be quite refreshing.

2.    Wirefy

Wireframe is to a website what spinal column is to human structure: The backbone everything is built upon.

With that in mind, Wirefy allows you to build your own responsive wireframes. It’s a simple online tool with all the necessities covered: standard 12-column, 960-px Grid system with nestled columns and push-pull offsetting, has responsive navigation, font-icons by icomoon, and more.

It’s sweet, simple, and efficient.

3.    Macaw

It’s a ‘code-savvy web design tool’. We love how it blurs the lines between code and design.

It’s a native-app, so you’ll have to download and install it. Once you do, you’ll be able to use the array of features it comes packed with: image editor, drag-and-drop UI, and the real-time fluid layout engine named Stream, which practically takes the hassle of coding off your shoulders. The app uses Alchemy, an engine which transforms all your designs into code without you ever having to touch the latter.

It’s bizarre, it’s magical, and its trial version is available for free. It’s a must-have for those who consider coding equivalent to slow suicide from boredom.

4.    Adaptive Images

In responsive design, there’s no one-size-fits-all. Smaller devices and their lower bandwidth can’t handle desktop-sized images. The solution is simple: scaling. But it’s often tricky with images. What if you lose the quality?

That’s not something that will happen. A nifty tool like Adaptive Images helps you scale your images after confirming the requesting user’s screen size, and then scales the image down or up as required.

It’s almost too simple to work. But amazingly, it does, and with most CMSs and existing markups too, which means it won’t cause troubles in your code.

This tool is designer + developer friendly. Bonus points just for that.

5.    Screenfly

This one is quickly becoming a classic online tool for testing your responsive site. It deserves the title, that’s for sure.

Screenfly will test your @media queries for you if you just give it the URL of your site’s page. You can click through different device dimensions available in the panel and check how your site looks on them.

The web-app itself has a nice, upbeat UI that’s fun and easy to use.

Conclusion

These are all designer-friendly tools to help you make the web responsive. There’s little-to-no coding-trouble attached to them. They’re fast, simple, and efficient… All the things a good responsive design should be.