“Design is a suite of web-design and development assistive tools which can be utilised on any web-page. Encompassing utilities for grid layout, measurement and alignment, Design is a uniquely powerful JavaScript bookmarklet.”

– From Alan Jardine.

You can add Design to your toolbar or list of bookmarks in a second, then with any web page loaded use it to take measurements directly from the page with absolute accuracy.

Javascript bookmarklets have several advantages over browser plugins, not least their being cross-platform. And, as Jardine says, “you always get the most up-to-date version every time you load it”. Design is both beautiful and inspiring.

One niggle, though. The lack of IE6 support means it can’t be used to help fix the inevitable layout bugs encountered when developing for that browser. But I suspect IE6’s bugginess would make porting Design a nightmare, so it’s a forgiveable omission.

.Anyone who like me works on more than one version of the same site at the same time (at the risk of changing the wrong one accidentally, which has happened to me in the past) may appreciate ChromaTabs It assigns colours to tabs for different sites automatically.

The colour is assigned either based either on the server name (using some mysterious “random” algorithm) which seems to meet my needs, or colours in the favicon.ico, which is not so useful. The default colours are not very aesthetically pleasing but you can tweak them to some extent, and anyway, that’s not really the point.

Extra visual cues like this can help a lot especially when under time pressure and at greater risk of making errors. Simple, yet effective, like many of the best tools.