7 Best and Free Photoshop Plugins for UI Designers

Photoshop continues to be one of the most popular tools for a web designer or a web design agency. Any effects can be created with this powerful tool. It encompasses some incredible features with which designers can create attractive UI designs. But there are still some features that have certain restrictions. To deal with such shortfalls, plugins can be used. With the help of plugins, a web designer or a web design agency can easily bridge the functionality gap to enhance their work potentials.

There are several excellent Photoshop plugins for web designers which can ably complement their creative endeavors. For your convenience, we have created a list of 7 best and free Photoshop plugins, which can be extremely helpful for the designer or a web design agency.

Pexels

It can be quite challenging to get appropriate imagery for design purposes. As a web designer, this can be extremely annoying. There are several sites with photo banks, but using images from these can throw up copyright issues. So, as a web designer, what would you do?

This is where Pexels stock photo can help you out. Over here all the photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero and can be used freely without any attribution. The Pexels offers the web design agency or web designers a simple and convenient Photoshop plugin to enhance the value of their creatives. This plugin can make the entire Pexels library available inside Photoshop.

Prisma

This can be an ideal plugin for designers if they regularly deal with color swatches. The Prisma plugin gives a variety of global color swatches, which designers can use at their own discretion. This can be more than handy for the web designers, who are using the same colors throughout pages.

Prisma enables you to synchronize colors on various PSD files, connect layers, and redo coloring on several items. With this plugin, the designers have the freedom to choose colors from three different places: the normal Photoshop swatches, the color picker dialog, and the color panel.

Fontself Maker

This happens to be a precious font generator that gels well with both Illustrator and Photoshop CC. Fontself Maker can be used to create an open type font very quickly. This plugin has the ability to lend your design a total makeover via experimental fonts, custom color, and design.

With this tool at your disposal, you can easily turn any share into a character and incorporate custom color in it. Through Fontself Maker, you can build a comprehensive font library and also share the same with others as well.

Ink

This happens to be a specification generating plugin that can be extremely useful for web designers. The Ink plugin is very much user-friendly and is considered ideal for UI designers. With this plugin, the web designer will be able to generate a specification of their project and share it with other developers as well.

For example, you can use it to trigger off specification pertaining to layers, typography, text format, etc. This is a project tool with which you can transfer any requirements devoid of any hassle.

Layrs Control 2

This is another layer management plugin which is perfect for managing big projects having excessive use of layers surrounding them. With Layer Control 2, a designer can spare themselves a lot of effort and save their precious time as well.

As for beginners, this plugin helps optimize projects as well. This is quite effective in eliminating unused effect or empty layers. Also, the plugin can be utilized to make smart objects straight out of the layers. This plugin is also compatible with the latest version of Photoshop.

Font Awesome PS

This plugin happens to be a firm favorite of the majority of web designers. With the advent of this handy plugin, the job of designers has become much easier. The Font Awesome provides quick access to all the free Font Awesome icons, and you can incorporate them easily to your designs as well.

The ease of use is something that puts this plugin in a special category. To begin with, you need to look for the icon you wish to use in the Font Awesome PS panel. After this, you are required to integrate the selected icon to your design as a new Photoshop layer.

Skeuomorphism.it

This is another Photoshop plugin that can be very valuable for web designers. In case you want to turn some designs flat, Skeuomorphism.it can be more than handy for you. Skeuomorphism is a common phrase used in graphical user interface design to define interface objects that imitates their real-world counterparts in appearance and the way the user can interact with them. So, this  free Photoshop extension transforms any skeuomorphism design into flat ones with ease and convenience.

If you find anything such as icon, background or  templates that you intend to turn flat, this is the plugin for the same. However, to use this plugin, you should have Photoshop CS6 active  on your equipment. With this plugin, designers can save a lot of time and the transition part is also very quick. Over here, web designers are not required to redo the design process at all. In order to turn anything flat on your website, a mere click is more than sufficient.

Conclusion

These are some of the best and free Photoshop plugins for a UI designer with which he or she can boost the potency of their creatives. In fact, these plugins are ideal for giving your Photoshop experience an extra edge. By using these plugins, a designer’s productivity is bound to go up and enable them to wrap up their assignments swiftly. So, in case you are looking to enhance the functionality aspect of Photoshop, then use these free plugins.

 

Author’s Bio: I’m Jay M, a web designer cum blogger working with iPraxa – A Web Design & Development Company in Simi Valley, who has proven expertise in resolving all the technical complexities involved in the designing of innovative, unique websites and web apps. I spend my spare time on the web to learn about the latest technologies and love to share my knowledge with others through my content.