CSS which stands for Cascading Style Sheets is a sheet style language to make a webpage presentable. The purpose of CSS is to create visually engaging webpages and user interfaces through buttons, fonts, colours, etc.
CSS enables the separation of document content from document presentation including colours, fonts and layouts. This provides for flexibility and centralized control over specific aspects of design.
Today, we use CSS 3.0 which is best suited for responsive sites and HTML5. As CSS grew, more syntax started to be added. Earlier since various devices like tablets, smart phones weren’t around there wasno need for responsiveness and therefore CSS 1.0 and 2.0 worked well. Currently, V4 is still in development.
For those of you just starting out with web design, we’ve collated a bunch of resources and tools to help you find what you’re looking for.
CSS Resources
For Transitions
Animate.css is a library for css animations. Created by Daniel Eden, the library has over 70 css animations. At just the click of a button, you can choose your animation, preview it and download the one you want to use. Super useful!
For menus
Designing the perfect menu giving you trouble?
Enter CSS Menu Maker! CSS Menu Maker has over 65 themes to choose from which allows for easy integration as well as customisation. Forget all the complicated code. This tool helps you download just the right menu and make it completely yours through customisation and tweaks as you wish.
Pure CSS Menu is another great resource for creating amazing bootstrap dropdown menus for responsive pages. It’s especially useful for those who have basic computer skills and do not want to work with complicated codes. The download is available for both Windows and Mac.
For colours
Colours can make or break your design. Choosing the right ones are critical. Flat UI Colors is an uber cool resource tool that offers you a range of colours and shades. Copy the code of the colour you want with a single click and you’re good to go!
Flat UI Colour picker is another great tool for a range of colours. It has a lot more colours and shades than most other websites.
uiGradients is another one we really recommend. Since the colours are displayed as shades, it’s easier to get an idea of what colours go together, unlike other sites that display each colour block separately. It’s super easy to copy and extremely useful!
For buttons
CSS Tricks has a cool button generator that you can make use of. It’s extremely simple to use and can generate your button in seconds.
Best CSS Button Generator too does pretty much the same however, the button font options are a lot more here. It can be added as a Chrome plugin for easy use anytime. It also gives you far more control on the shape of the button, borders, text shadow etc.
For web fonts
Limited fonts on your computer? Fret not! Transfont allows you to specify online fonts to display texts on your webpage. This allows you to provide your own font instead of depending on the limited font bank you have available on your computer.
Font 2 web converter converts .ttf and .otf fonts to .ttf, .otf, .eot, .woff and .svg files. All you need to do is upload your font and viola, it’s done!
Google web fonts too has a fantastic library of fonts available including the Devanagari script. Easily downloadable, these fonts are varied and over 815 fonts are available on this library!
For Borders
Don’t be be put off by the name, Angry Tools is useful for varying borders and styles. There are bunch of styles you can play with. They have some pretty cool borders that you can choose from. Hands down, the best border generator.
To Clean up your code
Lastly, after you’re done, clean your code! Untidy codes make it difficult to spot errors or unnecessary tags that could break your code. There are a couple of CSS tools to help clean up your code so you can work better. Our recommendations:
CSSTidy: Simply insert your code or upload your file & watch the magic happen!
Clean CSS: Clean CSS has a fantastic collection of tools for cleaning up your code for better reading. At Clean CSS, you will find CSS Minify which enables compressing your css for faster website load. It does this by eliminating all the unnecessary spacing and new lines.
Clean CSS also has CSS formatter which also is useful for beautifying your code.
We hope we were able to point you to some of the basic, popularly used tools for CSS to help you get started! If you’re still having trouble getting a styling you want, for everything else, there’s Boot Snipp that gives you ALL sorts of styling at one place!
Go ahead and explore & if you come across something interesting, share it with us in the comments below!
If you’d like to write for us, leave us a comment & we’ll get in touch with you!
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