Geeks love tools and gadgets. But when you make a living in IT, having the right tools and gadgets is more than a whim because they help you do your job in a better way. There are literally millions of useful tools and gadgets for a designer and even if we wanted, we wouldn’t be able to describe them all.

This short list of 10 cool designer tools and gadgets has been compiled with usefulness in mind. This means that all the stuff on the list will make your job as a designer easier – at least a bit. Additionally, all the tools and gadgets in this list are free.

1. The Web Developer’s Toolbox for Firefox

The Web Developer’s Toolbox for Firefox is one of the tools every designer should have. There are many useful Firefox extensions but this one is a jewel because it combines so many functionalities a web designer and developer needs on a daily basis that after you install it you will wonder how you could have worked without it. It contains a bunch of useful extensions, which of course you can download separately if you want but why do it, when you can get the whole pack at once?

2. A Tool to Generate Palettes of Matching Colors With

Design is about colors and their masterful combination. Very often you will need to design a site, which uses different shades of the same color. In such cases a color palette generator tool is really helpful. There are many such tools but not all of them do a good job. If it were to produce tasteless combinations of colors, you can do it on your own, right?

The Slayer Office color generator we recommend is different because it uses a serious approach to color generation. You enter your base color and the tool suggests you the other colors automatically. The other colors are calculated as the base color with different percentages of opacity and the result is that you get a really harmonic color palette, not a random combination of colors that don’t match well.

3. Sell Your Designs at Cafepress

There are many money-making opportunities for talented designers. For instance, one place where you can make some money is CafePress. CafePress is an online store for T-shirts, bags, hats and other everyday items. The difference is that when customers buy something they can choose what to have printed on it.

Here is where you come into the game. You can upload for free designs of yours and when customers pick any of these designs to have it printed on an item they purchase, you make money. The designs at CafePress are not necessarily complicated. There are many simple designs – i.e. slogans or even single word designs that sell like hot cakes. Such designs are not difficult to make and even if you don’t manage to sell tons of them, the fact that you are getting some free publicity also counts.

4. Get Tons of Free Icons

FatCow is a place where you can find tons of free web icons you can use in your projects. FatCow is not an icon gallery but it contains more stuff than many dedicated icon galleries. The icons there are licensed under the Creative Commons License, which means that you can use them for any purpose (including in commercial projects) but if you want to be on the safe side, before you use the icons, check again if the terms haven’t been modified in the meantime.

5. Create Great Logos Fast

Many designers hate when they have to create logos. Logos are small but very often it is much harder to create a professional logo than to create a small site. The trick is to create a logo, which is simple, yet powerful and which can be used in different sizes for different purposes.

Well, this is easier to say than to do. You can spend endless nights creating a logo, or you can use a logo generator. It is true that even the most advanced logo generator doesn’t give you as much flexibility as you have when you design a logo in Photoshop but if you want a fast logo generator that generates logos with decent quality, check the CoolText logo generator. The CoolText logo generator has many logo styles to choose from and many options to set and it allows to create really cool logos.

6. A Tool to Create Banners Quickly

Similarly to logos, banners can be created with an online banner generator. There isn’t a shortage of such programs but not all of them are a good pick. One of the good banner generators is this one. It allows to set many banner options and it is a great solution for those cases, when you need to have right away a banner with decent quality. If you need a perfect banner, you should take your time and design it in Photoshop, GIMP or any other similar program.

7. Preview Your Site in Almost Any Existing Browser

Browser compatibility is a favorite topic for any designer. Browser compatibility (or more precisely – incompatibility) can take you a lot of time to achieve but if you do care about the quality of your sites, you can’t skip it.

Testing browser compatibility also takes a lot of time, even if you have all the browsers installed. However, you can’t possibly install all the browsers your visitors use. Anyway, you don’t need to because there is a great online service – Browser Shots, where you can preview your site not only in multiple browsers but also in multiple versions of these browsers.

8. Get Free Images from Morgue File

Images are the lifeblood of web design and many designers have collections of hundreds of thousands of images. However, no matter how many images you have in your collection, getting some more free images with top quality is an offer you can’t decline. Out of the hundreds of sites with free images, Morgue File stands out because its collection is really impressive and as a rule, its images are free to use in any kind of project. However, as with any other site with free goodies, you’d better check again the licensing terms so that you are absolutely sure you are not violating them unintentionally.

9. A Tool to Create a Color Palette from an Image

Sometimes you have a cool photo you would like to use as a source of colors for a color palette. While you can pick colors one by one, this is hardly the most efficient way to do the job. One of the better ways to get a color palette from an image is to use a tool.

Pictaculous is one such tool. All you have to do is go to the site and upload your image. Then the tool will automatically generate a color palette from this image. Depending on the image you upload, the choices might not be what you imagined but you can hardly blame the tool for that.

10. Lossless Image Optimization with Smush.it

Images can get very fat and this is a problem because when image files are large, it will take ages for the site to load. Sometimes you can optimize an image to make it smaller but usually smaller size leads to reduced image quality. Reduced image quality might be acceptable in certain situations but generally why accept it when there is a better way to do things?

Smush.it is a Yahoo service you can use for free and compress your images without impacting their quality in a negative way. The algorithm used by Smush.it is really good and this is why lossless image optimization is possible.

The above list has been penned down by Joanna who is part of web hosting search from last 2 years and been around in the industry over 5 years now. She has now started contributing articles for the blog hosting nerds.