Jacob Gube's "Six Revisions" Blog

Adobe AIR - a cross-platform runtime environment for rich Internet and desktop applications - is just starting to get popular outside of the early-adopter circles, but there’s already a growing amount of tools and utilities that can help web designers with various design-related and managerial tasks. If you’re a web designer that’s into experimenting and trying out new applications (they don’t cost a dime), check out these 10 Adobe AIR applications perfect for web designers. Graphics designers, interaction designers, and web developers might also find this collection useful.

Em Calculator

The Em Calculator created by James Whittaker is based on an article on 24 ways entitled Compose to a Vertical Rhythm. It’s a pain-free way of creating CSS code for typography set on a baseline style, allowing the design to maintain its typographic proportions (i.e. size, line height, margin, padding) when the web page is viewed at a different font sizes.

colorPicker

colorPicker is a simple desktop application for determining hexadecimal values of web-safe colors. colorPicker saves colors you’ve used during the session so you can quickly refer back to it. If a web-safe color isn’t quite what you’re looking for, there’s an option for adjusting the selected color’s RGB values.

AIR Icon Generator

The AIR Icon Generator is for designers needing a quick icon/web 2.0 badge created. Using the tool is a easy as pie: enter the text you want to display, choose the icon you want to generate (there’s currently only two styles available) and the color, press "generate icon" and you’re good to go. The output provides four different sizes of the generated icon.

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