In April, Jeffrey Way provided us with a list of the “20 Mac Apps You’ll Use Every Day.” Not one to be biased, if you prefer Windows, this article rounds up the best programs available for boosting your productivity as a web designer.

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Being a web designer is not easy. Not only do we need to have a good

understanding about visual design, typography, information architecture,

psychology and a plethora of other disciplines; in our work, we need to

take care of so many details, so that our job becomes more and more

time-consuming, requiring dozens of tools, attention span and an

effective workflow for beautiful, timely and functional results.

And

this is where small time-savers become handy. Be it a handy checklist,

batch installer, dummy image generator or converter from Excel

spreadsheet to HTML — all these things can save us a couple of minutes

every day, making our work easier and more efficient. And this is why we

keep collecting them for Smashing Magazine’s readers. Whether you like

lists or not: this one will probably help you find those little nuggets

out there that will help you avoid headaches and stress. Below we

present useful time-savers for web designers.

You

may want to subcribe

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newsletter is sent out once every two weeks.

[Offtopic: by the

way, did you know that there is a Smashing eBook Series? Book #1 is Professional

Web Design

, 242 pages for just $9,90.]

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If you’ve been around the web for a while, you might have heard of Lightbox. And if you used it, you might also know the limitations.

One of those limitations is of course the fact that an image wider than your screen goes out of bounds. Very annoying! And it creates ugly scrolbars.

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As bokeh is more than often very pleasing to the eye, photographers

tend to purposely produce bokeh in their images, and sometimes

deliberately take out-of-focus shots to take images that show nothing

other than bokeh. Designers have picked up on this, and over the years

there has been a huge increase of bokeh being used in graphic, print,

and web design. This round-up consists of a whopping 626 textures, both

free (the majority) and premium, which you can use to spice up your

photos, as backgrounds for your latest web design, and, as most of them

are high resolution, even in your print design projects.

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Modal Windows In Modern Web Design [Read More…]