I’ve been a big fan of Smashing Magazine, the online web design and development blog, for a number of years now. While there overall content is really solid on a day to day basis, occasionally they have a post like the one below that provides so much value that I’d be remiss in not passing it along. I hope some of the tools and services they list are as useful to you as they are to us.

Useful Web Services, Tools, and Resources for Web Designers (or in my opinion web developers, UI specialists, copywriters, etc…)

What are your favorites in the list? Are there any others you think should be included? As always, I would love to hear what everyone out in the ether thinks.

I just finished reading over a post from Six Revisions about “The Benefits of Wireframing“. It’s a great review of why taking the time to do wireframes before jumping into design mockups and development prototypes saves time, money, and headaches over the long haul. I highly recommend you take a minute to read it if you are in the process of creating a spec or writing stories for a new web app.

When we do internal projects we always take time to work up wireframes before we get into the meat of the project and it just about always ends up being a step that we look back on as beneficial to the overall project. Here are some of the tools and resources we use ourselves, hopefully they will help you on your next project.

• Balsamiq - One of the premier tools for wireframing to be released.
• Wirify - A great tool that allows you to take any site and turn it into a wireframe (or at least the foundation of a wireframe).
• Mockflow - A web-based app that offers similar functionality to Balsamiq
• The Pencil Project - An open source GUI tool.
• OmniGraffle for iPad - The iPad version of the very popular Mac software.

Other reference material:

• Ultimate Guide to Website Wireframing
• Wireframes Magazine
• I ♥ Wireframes Gallery