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I make a lot of simple single executable applications for various things at home and at work. Icons always seem to be a problem for me I am not a designer. Like most I can do a little here and there with photoshop, gimp and paint.net. However I should not be trusted if things need to look "good".
The question is how do you deal with icons for small (often one day) projects that just need something unique. Nothing flashy just enough that the user can associate it with its use and find it quickly on a desktop. Even something like the Gravatar fractal based icons would be a good starting point.
I'm aware that when asked about free icons the big box of knowledge comes back with many results but I want to know what my peer (and superior) developers do in these kinds of situations.
If it's icon-making software you use and you're enough of a designer that it doesn't look awful that's great, but may not be doable for me.
Do you ever buy icons? What is a reputable site for commercial products and where would you steer clear of?
Lastly what types of licenses do you look out for when using free icons found around the net?
First off, a disclaimer - I'm not an application developer, but a (amateur, technically speaking, since I'm not getting paid for this) web designer/developer. I use a lot of icons in my projects, but since I'm on a budget of $0.00, I have a fairly large collection of icons obtained from the internet, so I feel that I should have some say on this matter.
Automatically Generating your Icons
Automatically generated icons are a big no-no for me. Unless your application is a fractal generator, the generated icons usually won't fit the application. You're better off sticking to the plain or if you're using this.
Free Icons
Free icons are pretty good if you don't need anything too fancy. You didn't mention anything about whether the projects are commercial in nature, because legality is a big factor in determining what you can use. Also remember that in Vista/Windows 7 icons can go as big as 256x256 - icons of that size are not usually available for free icons.
In terms of legality, options for using free icons for commercial software is a lot less, than say, a freeware/FOSS project. Look carefully at the licenses: Creative Commons is a fairly popular choice these days, but there are others. Usually attribution is required, which usually means acknowledging them in the "About" section or the "README" file.
Sources for Free Icons
Like I said, I know of a lot, but these are the ones that I feel you should look at first.
Open Source Desktop Icon Projects.
Tango Desktop Project Base Icons (Public Domain, attribution preferred)
Crystal Icon Project (LGPL)
Hydroxygen Icon Project (CCGNU/GPL)
Candy Desktop Project (GPL)
Prominent Icon sets*
FamFamFam Silk (CC-by 2.5)
Buuf Iconset (CC-by-sa-nc 3.0)
Fugue Icons (CC-by 3.0)
Sources
Icon Archive
DeviantArt
Designing your own
Well, I can't say how good the icons are without actually looking at your icons, but there are certain things to keep in mind, specifically the Windows Icon Design Guideline published by Microsoft.
There are far too many if you want a complete list, but these are the good ones
The silk icons are free:
“Silk” is a smooth, free icon set, containing over 700 16-by-16 pixel icons in strokably-soft PNG format. Containing a large variety of icons, you're sure to find something that tickles your fancy. And all for a low low price of $0.00. You can't say fairer than that.
There are also the lesser-known Silk Companion 1 and Silk Companion II, icon sets from other designers in the same style as (and often based on) Silk.
I've found the GlyFX icon sets to be really well made, and worth their money. They provide a great range of icons, both in the Windows XP and now in the Vista style.
They also have a product called "Iconbox" which is basically custom-made icons for other customers that didn't insist on them being exclusive - so they sell these off to interested developers, too.
GlyFX also does custom work, if you really need something done e.g. for a commercial or semi-commercial product, at quite reasonable rate (last time I checked, anyway).
Highly recommended.
Marc
lgpl icons for use in commercial, gpl seems to work for everything else.
The gravatar icon is a cool idea. I guess you'd just have to convert them over to ico's.
Typically I just take something that's already in the development library. Otherwise there's tons of desktop icons out there to choose from.
I held an icon design contest with a $400 usd award, for a new icon for my program. It required a lot of sketching and feedback on every entry and there was little time for anything else. There was no awards to second places and I think it really affected how much effort people would spend on it.
Make sure you have plenty of time available for this. Make sure there is awards to 1st, 2nd, 3rd place.
In retrospect.. there must be another way to get a good icon made.
I'm found the Yusuke Kamiyamane's Fugue and Diagona icon sets useful. The Fugue set has 3000 icons, and Diagona 400. Fugue offers a variety of concepts, with variants of some.
You may also find this previous question useful.
I like the perfect icon icon suites. These are paid icons, but are pretty cheap and are high quality. They will also design custom icons for you for around $15.
http://www.perfecticon.com/
Related
I'm trying to develop an icon for my app, specifically the play store icon which is 512 x 512. I've Google for days now and only find Photoshop stuff, which is too expensive for me and the learning curve just for one icon is not worth it.
Do any of you know of cheaper software that I can buy and use, specifically something that just help you create high quality icons?
I am also open to courses for Gimp and Paint that can teach you, but not Photoshop please. I know they are the best but they don't think of guys like me that are starting out.
I'm not sure whether this is the proper place for this kind of question, but I think Gimp seems the most reasonable option. The web is full of tutorials for it, so I think it's worth searching there. For example: Creating Icons
How can I ensure (or try to make) web access available for all - who may have a variety of disabiltes?
Any advice for any standards or web sites that could give me some pragmatic advice for the design of a site?
There are a number of considerations you need to address here, if your website isn't catering for a specific disability then you have to work on a broad range of features. In this situation the first thing you need to remember is that you sadly can't cater to everyone. Look at the list below and identify which of these disabilities you can sensibly cater for
Visual: Visual impairments including blindness, various common types
of low vision and poor eyesight, various types of color blindness;
Motor/Mobility: e.g. difficulty or inability to use the hands,
including tremors, muscle slowness, loss of fine muscle control, etc.,
due to conditions such as Parkinson's Disease, muscular dystrophy,
cerebral palsy, stroke;
Auditory: Deafness or hearing impairments,
including individuals who are hard of hearing;
Seizures: Photoepileptic seizures caused by visual strobe or flashing effects.
Cognitive/Intellectual: Developmental disabilities, learning
disabilities (dyslexia, dyscalculia, etc.), and cognitive disabilities
of various origins, affecting memory, attention, developmental
"maturity," problem-solving and logic skills, etc.
The easiest here is the Seizures, eliminate flashing / strobing content from your site, or more importantly if you cant put up a warning before displaying this type of content.
Users with Motor / Mobility issues may have problems interacting with content on your site that requires a high amount of precision, this can be helped by increasing the size of your UI elements, or allowing the user to resize these elements if needed.
Generally make anything clickable as large as is feasible and if you have elements that have features such as drag drop, make the drag handles large so the user doesn't have to click a tiny area.
Auditory is also a fairly easy consideration to make, at the least simply provide text alternatives to any media content your site may have, for larger sites using video then considerations such as sign language may be an option.
Visual is probably the most common consideration web developers need to make. Firstly partially sighted users may want to increase the text size to your page, so make sure that your UI can cope with this. Use clear and readable fonts and make sure there is contrast between the background color and the font color.
Color blind users may wish to change your site color scheme to meet their needs, you can find information easily on the types of color blindness and develop a couple of alternative CSS styles to meet these needs. Also a high contrast option for everything on your site may benefit partially sighted users.
Cognitive / Intellectual is one of the harder considerations to meet, so look at the individual disabilities. ADD for instance makes it hard for a person to focus and makes them easily distracted, considering this think about advertisements, they are designed to distract us and draw our attention, thus by limiting advertisements on your site you can get rid of the ones that flash and scream Click ME!.
Dyslexic users may struggle with reading huge chunks of text which also fits in with considerations for partially sighted people, here you could have an audio option so the text is read aloud to the user.
One more consideration here is the use of color in your website. It has been proven that certain colors can stimulate emotions, for someone with emotional or developmental issues using colors that are considered calming vs ones that excite (reds for example) may improve their experience of your website.
All of the above are design considerations, looking at the development (Code) next there isn't too much you can do, most of the considerations about your code are because of third party applications interacting with your site.
Generally make sure your code is well formed, correct tags / closing tags etc. Make sure it is valid HTML / XHTML / CSS etc if you can validate to the strict standards it wont hurt your cause. Tags such as links / images should have appropriate Alt text to describe what the element is, for instance alt="image1" is fairly useless to a screen reader but alt="Image showing ...... clicking this will take you to....." is useful.
If you can find some trial software grab yourself a screen reader, load up your website, close your eyes and try interact with it, its going to be hard but at least you can see how your user will interact with your site and more importantly you can use the screen reader to check your site actually gets read the way it should.
There are plenty of 3rd party plugins you can integrate with your site to aid your users too, so look into those, things like the option to magnify text or read aloud with just a click will be well received as long as they are not too intrusive to your non disabled users.
Helpful links
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ The W3C Disability guidelines are a good place to start
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility Wikipedia web accessability
http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/ Allows you to see how images will appear to colourblind users
http://colorfilter.wickline.org/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ W3C Web Accessability Initiative Guidelines
Section 508 is the section of the law that requires that US government websites be accessible.
More information is here, including best practices on making content accessible to all.
http://www.section508.gov/
Generally you should support screen readers by using semantic markup, and avoid flashy content and audio -- these are usually impossible or just difficult to make accessible.
You should also look at web typography guidelines and look to hiring a good designer. Poor color schemes, typefaces, and font sizes make reading on the web much harder than it needs to be.
If you're from the UK, from a legal POV you want to be looking at the Equality Act (which replaced the Disability Discrimination Act).
The foundation of web accessibility is based on the graceful degradation/progessive enhancement model (sounds more complicated than it is!). A List Apart wrote a great article on it some time ago.
A good starting point for web professionals is the RNIB's Web Access Centre. Obviously this mainly deals with those user who experience visual disability, but it's a very useful resource.
Web AIM is also a good site for resources/articles although I'm not sure how often it's maintained these days (still, the information there is relevant).
There are far too many individual little things to bear in mind when developing accessible interfaces, but if you take the time to read some of the articles on those sites, you'll pick up the fundamentals which will then lead you onto the more nitty-gritty things.
Accessible development is about a change in mindset as much as learning the nuts and bolts. You need to to be constantly asking yourself "How might other people use this? What barriers might be in their way? What browser are they using? Does this work without colour/JavaScript/CSS?". Learn how to take your site apart and see if it still works.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) is the W3C Recommendation from Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C/WAI).
An overview can be found here: http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag20
There are very broad Principles as well as precise Techniques (for HTML, CSS, JS, Flash, etc) and the intent of each and every criteria. These aren't documents meant to be read at once and you'll want to learn more from tutorials and articles found on the web (archives at 456 Berea Street, WebAIM, videos about accessibility)
The W3C Quick Reference guide to WCAG 2 lists all of the relevant techniques you'll need to implement the WCAG2 principles and guidelines that Felipe mentioned, with code examples if appropriate on the individual technique pages. If it's all a bit too technical for you, WebAIM's checklist is the same thing only in plain English.
Unfortunately there's no magic wand for getting sites to be compliant. You have to go through each bit of content and test it and modify it if necessary. Luckily, even some small improvements can make a big difference.
A lot of good answers, but I can't help adding my input as well.
If you want to ensure a website is disabled friendly, there are a number of considerations that should be taken. One that I have not seen on here (perhaps because I skimmed) is to ensure that you use high-contrast colors, with a solid background behind text.
However, you should NOT use white on black or white on black...dyslexics commonly cannot see those colors. Use an off-white for background or text.
Also, make sure your text is large. Ensure as much of the content as possible is standard text, so that text-to-speech programs can "read" the website. Text-to-speech cannot read images. Text links instead of buttons would also be advisable, for the same reasons (though there may be a means of associating text with a button for these scenarios...?)
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I'm developing a small IDE, and I'm wondering where I can find a set of IDE icons. A few google searches didn't turn anything up that was too useful. I suppose that's probably because an 'ide icon set' wouldn't get very many purchases (compared to more generic icons).
In any case, does anyone know where I can get some such icons? Certain icons such as save, load, etc I can find myself. I'm looking for more debugging-related icons.
Icons I'm interested in include:
start debug
step over, step into, etc
run/debug
view dissassembly
etc.
I'd like some larger ones for the main toolbar, plus some mini's for to sit beside important actions in the dropdown menus.
I will very likely not be profiting from my humble IDE, but in the case that I 'go commercial', I'd like the icons' license(s) to not limit me that way. I have no problem with attribution in the about menu and in the code, however.
Finally, commercial icons are not at all off-limits if they're reasonably cheap, but I'd prefer free ones :)
Thanks!
Update: 100 rep bounty
Here is an example set of icons that would be perfect (size/style) if it included the actual icons I need. In fact I'll probably use some of those icons anyway, such as the cut, paste and save icons. I also might use the 'play' and 'record' buttons for start and create breakpoint respectively.
I'm especially looking for step/run-to-cursor icons. Preferred icon size: 22x22px.
EDIT: What about the Netbeans icons? They're the perfect size and look very nice, but I can't seem to find any information about whether or not I'm allowed to use them. I realize netbeans is opensource, but I can't figure out if I can take the icons.
EDIT: It turns out that using NetBeans icons is fine, so I'm going with that. Thanks everyone!
A set of icons with a liberal license can be found at http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/. They're not IDE specific, but there are lots of them, only 16x16 though.
You could use some of the icons from Eclipse = they are available under the same licence as the rest of Eclipse. I had a quick look at my local install of Eclipse and lots of the icons are in subfolders under configuration\org.eclipse.osgi\bundles so you could search through the .gifs under there.
About using Standard Microsoft Icons.
The vast majority of developers out there don't know that Visual Studio comes with an Image Library. So here goes two links that highlight it:
About using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Image Library.
About using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Image Library.
how about http://sekkyumu.deviantart.com/art/Developpers-Icons-63052312
"You are free to use these icons on personal and/or commercial projects without any attribution or credit. "
(source: deviantart.net)
EDIT
also look at http://lokheed.deviantart.com/art/gperfection-sup2-Icon-Set-18530981
AND
Fugue Icons
Preview(Big)
And here (BUT ITS $74.5) ->
http://www.awicons.com/stock-icons/xp-artistic-icons/
Step-over
Compile
Step-into
Run to cursor
The Crystal icons are pretty cool.
this is a nice icon set: http://p.yusukekamiyamane.com/
can find just about anything else here: http://www.iconfinder.com/
The Humanity icons from Ubuntu are awesome.
100% SVG, license GPLv2.
I've never really learned much about accessibility but it seems like an important topic.
When you build a website or piece of software, or when you're talking to a client about a website, where does accessibility come in? Or from your experience, if you don't have accessibility in something you've built for a client, do you get a lot of requests to include it, or does it limit you in some financial way?
What are the numbers, I guess. What's the return in your business, how many people have you talked to that need it? Do you yourself need accessibility features?
I do mainly Flex/Flash and it seems like I'll have to do a bit of work to have full accessibility.
Thanks for the help.
As a person with a disability myself, I am consious of adding accessibility features when I write software
Accessibility is an area of software design concerned with making software user interfaces avvessibile for people with physical or mental disabilities or imparements. Different people have different specific needs and you can't be expected to cater specifically to each but there are some broad groupings
Visual Imparements:
This includes blindness or color blindness. To assist in this area consider providing "good" alt text (clarified blow) and hints so that screen readers can present a view of your content that makes sense aurally. Providing easy access to links to raise text size and/or access to some high contrast stylesheet options is also a good idea.
Non-Mouse Users
There are a huge number of conditions that can prevent one from being able to successfully mouse, it took a few years for me and my brain, which is somewhat unreliable when it comes to spatial relationships to pick up the skill. For these people keyboard access is really helpful, I don't work in the web space so I'm not sure if there are standard keys to use, but these are communicated by screenreaders and tooltips so having any is better than none.
Hanselminutes episode #125 is quite educational. He talks with a blind user about accessibility on the web and in generalAccessibility is omitted from a lot of design processes, either because businesses don't have an immediate need for it and therefore don't consider it at all, or consider it a low priority feature. Leguslation in various countries has helped a bit in this regard, but the real problem is that accessibility in general is usually an afterthaught to the design process,
1"Good" alt text is judicious use of alt text that accentuates the content or purpose of a page, navigation elements should have alt text describing where interacting with them will take the user, similarly, things that aren't content, like spacers should have no alt text at all, because there is nothinng worse then hearing "Foo's widgets spacer spacer spacer spacer spacer nav_Products spacer nav_support"
I think accessibility is usually completely forgotten about (either implicitly or explicitly dismissed beforehand because of issues like cost) in most software development projects. Unless companies (or individual developers, more likely) already have experience with either people with disabilities or with writing software with disabilities of users in mind.
As a developer I at least try to do keyboard shortcuts correctly in software I work on (because that's something I can easily dog-food myself, since I try to keep hands-on-keyboard as much as possible). Apart from that it depends on whether there are requirements about accessibility.
I do think this kind of thing is part of "programming taxes", i.e. things that you as a developer should always be doing, but...
I am only aware of this - at least more than the average developer, I think - because I have once written software for a software magazine on floppy disk, or Flagazine. This was in PowerBasic 3.2, grown out of BASIC sources in a magazine, making these sources available by BBS and disk, eventually growing a menu around the little applications to easily start them, etc.
One of our primary users (and later members of the editorial staff) was blind and was appalled when we switched from text mode to an EGA mouse driven menu, as his TSR screenreader software couldn't do anything with graphics. It turned out that his speech synthesizer simply accepted text from a COM port. It had a small (8K I think?) buffer that would be instantly cleared on reception of (I think) an ASCII 1 character. And that was it.
So we made the graphical menu (and most other programs on the Flagazine) completely keyboard accessable at all times and in the graphical programs we use a small library I wrote to send ASCII text to a configured COM port. This had small utility methods like ClearBuffer(). With this, and the convention of speaking possible menu actions when pressing the space bar, made all of this software accessable to our blind users.
I even adapted a terminal application for my HP48 calculator (adding a clear buffer/screen on ASCII 1) so I could use that to emulate a speech synthesizer. I would then test all of our software in each Flagazine by attaching my HP48 with the emulator running, turning off my computer monitor and trying if I could use all the software without seeing anything.
Those were the days, about 12 years ago... ;-)
I am a blind individual so have to develop with accessibility in mind if I want to use my own programs. I find my self focusing on accessibility based on the type of application I’m writing. When doing command line or mainframe applications I don’t think about accessibility since those environments are inherently accessible. With web based applications I have to give some thought to accessibility but not a lot. This is mainly because I write simple web applications for limited use so don’t have to worry about making the interface appealing, just usable. The area I spend the most time focused on accessibility is desktop applications. For example using .net I need to make sure accessible properties are set properly and that labels are in the proper position in relation to a text box so my screen reader can find them and associate them with the proper control.
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As a little side project, I am starting to build a new website for a certain organization I am affiliated to, which current site is simply outdated.
I am regularly a Java developer, and last time I really did some web development was back in the late 90s, when <p> was still more popular than <div> and Javascript was cutting-edge technology (JQuery is for lazy bums these days :) ).
Anyway, I feel really outdated. The website basically is going to be:
Django based
mostly serve static information pages
it will have a dynamic news and updates page (based on Django admin capabilites)
and some basic apps I'll develop myself (polls, small registration app, etc...)
My problem is designing the whole thing. I found some nice web-based CSS layout generators that got me going, but I still feel I'm wasting my time smoothing out the CSS files and aligning <div>s.
Are there any tools - the simpler and faster, the better - that you recommend I can use to speed up the design part of the site so I can concentrate on the real work?
I don't need anything fancy, just a nice looking layout and design that I can tweak a bit so the site will look presentable.
I second Brandon's suggestion to use a CSS framework. It won't give you 100% freedom to design anything you like, but it can speed up your design process greatly and free up your hands to do the coding you really want.
Suggestions Updated July 2013:
Twitter Bootstrap http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/ - complete grid, typo, UI widget prototyping framework
ZURB Foundation http://foundation.zurb.com/ - responsive grid, type, UI widget prototyping framework (similar in scope to Twitter Bootstrap, but feels 'cleaner' in some ways)
960 http://960.gs/ - grid layout system
Tripoli http://devkick.com/lab/tripoli/ - really good typography, but no grid system
YUI Grids http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/ - very customizable (to the point of overkill) grid system
Blueprint http://www.blueprintcss.org/ - grid system and basic typography
BlueTrip http://www.bluetrip.org - a hybrid system, mixing the best of the Blueprint grid with the best of the Tripoli typography
I won't lie to you. This website isn't the best place to go if you're looking for reliable Web Design advice. Stack Overflow is a programming community and programmers rarely know anything about design. If you want to get some real advice then I would strongly recommend the main Web Design/Development forums on the Internet, especially SitePoint.
That being said, as a former freelance Web Designer/Developer I'll offer my input on the issue. Not that you should value it, of course. After all, this is a programming website.
NEVER EVER SAY CSS LAYOUT GENERATOR EVER AGAIN! If you're going to seriously get into designing web pages then you need to learn semantic XHTML and CSS first. Whilst many people tout W3Schools as the definitive resource I see it as a programmers answer (i.e. not very good) and would prefer that you read up on the subject using...Google. There are countless examples of great websites to pick up the basics of Web Design/Development that Google is probably the best website for the job. Also, with a plethora of new websites offering this information you know it's going to be more improved than W3Schools. You'll seriously want to get clued-up on writing your design because it'll be much harder to fix things later on in the project.
If you're going to be designing web pages it would be a good idea to learn what actually makes a good design. Check out CSS Vault for a fantastic resource of some of the best-designed web pages around, of course with all the source code intact so you can have a play around with their code and see how they've managed some of the wonderful effects they've produced. I've learnt more than a thing or two from websites that have been featured on CSS Vault. On top of that you should read up on Web Design from the big Web Design/Development sites. Two of my favourites are SitePoint and A List Apart, two names that you'll near time and time again when you hear people talk about resources. Browse those websites, check their forums, see what REAL Web Designers/Developers are using, not what programmers are using.
On the subject of CSS Frameworks; they do help! The problem with using them is that you'll often spend so much time looking for a worthwhile framework that you could have finished most of the CSS for your website yourself. You'll either love them or hate them, but many people will say that they're not necessary.
Once you've got your mind set on what a good design looks like and you've got the resources you need to make something of value I suggest that you get to work! In reality when you're designing a web page all you really need is a text editor with a save function, an image manipulation program, a browser window and FireBug. An IDE helps a lot of people, but if you do use one then you'll definitely want to work in its text mode. I use NotePad++ or Emacs exclusively but a lot of people like to use Aptana Studio, so it may be worth a look.
When you're getting to actually building the code behind your website you can't really go much worse than your favourite IDE/Text Editor and a source control tool. As a Java programmer you're better suited to talk about programming so I won't lecture you on a subject you already know.
In the end, Web Design is going to take time and many of the tools that we choose to use that we claim will "save time" save very little in reality. If you're not a design guru then it will take you a substantial amount of time to create a great-looking website. It's a fact of life. Call me old-fashioned (a funny word coming from a 21 year old) but I still think that the quickest way is to sketch a design out on a piece of paper (a image program if really necessary) and to just get out there and make the damn thing! Again, I'll have to take this hunting for the silver bullet mentality as a programmers trait, one that really won't help that much when designing, because designing a web page is vastly different to writing a Java program.
In short, ignore everything you read here, read what REAL designers are doing and just make the damn thing!
There's one piece of advice that saves more time than any other when it comes to rapid development of CSS styled sites and that's KEEP IT SIMPLE
Use an attractive simple layout that doesn't require pixel perfection and that can 'gracefully' degrade in less compliant browsers (IE6). Minimise the amount of CSS and fix the basic bugs mentioned by meouw above. Then get on an concentrate on content and functionality...the real work
In my previous employment I created dozens of templates for websites.
The most useful too I ever discovered is the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar.
It has a wealth of small useful tools. My favorite feature is the ability to edit the CSS and see the results in real-time. This saves on the whole edit - upload - refresh cycle. Watch out for ie CSS inconsistencies though!
Off the top of my head, these are the most important gotchas.
double margin bug [google: double margin bug]
incorrect (but more intuitive) box model [google: box model]
incorrect (but more intuitive) float clearing [google: clearfix]
FireBug is another really usefull Firefox plugin for more in depth analysis.
I've always found Open Source Web Design to be a good resource when looking to get started trying to design something.
- http://patterntap.com/
- http://www.dotemplate.com/ (interesting concept of customizing template)
- http://www.templatemonster.com/
- http://www.freelayouts.com/websites/html-templates
- http://www.templateyes.com/
No idea what the site is going to be, but have you thought of using a pre-build CMS like Drupal, Joomla etc etc.? You can then tweak templates etc, rather than worrying about making it from scratch.
This question is pretty old, but since we're in 2012, it's only proper that I answer my own question with the exact thing I was looking for, back in 2009.
Twitter Bootstrap
Have you looked into any CSS frameworks? If you are competent enough with CSS something like a framework could help speed things up.
Don't forget firebug :) if you're worried about tweaking the design it's really great. With the inspect feature allowing you to real-time edit the CSS of your page.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
I second Jens Roland's list of CSS frameworks.
But I would also suggest you have a look at websites such as Smashing Magazine. You might find this article of interest, amongst a lot of others. They tend to do a lot of nice and long mash-ups for the web developers that will at least give you inspiration if not a direct solution.
A colleague of mine has been trying to convince me all week that Dreamweaver, 5 years after I was last forced to use it at gunpoint, is actually now worthwhile for knocking up a design quickly and painlessly, and is also now competent at producing the HTML for that design.
I refuse to invest the 10 minutes it would take to find out based on my previous experiences of it, but you might like to give the demo a quick run around the block :)
I'd recommend finding a CMS package, since you're using Django, look into django-cms. It has TinyMCE and Markdown Support so updating your pages should be easy. Also django-cms integrates well with the Django admin interface.
A piece of paper to sketch your design
A text editor (preferably set up to save directly to a development server local or otherwise) to write up the initial HTML/CSS
FireBug/IEDeveloperToolbar to inspect each element that looks wrong and edit its CSS directly in the browser until it looks fine, followed by commits with the text editor
If you're doing any JavaScript development, use an advanced editor that highlights errors and warnings as you type. This kind of functionality has until recently been the province of static language editors only, but the free NetBeans 6 achieves this amazing feat. Traditionally, you first discovered JavaScript typos and simple bugs when first loading the parent page into a browser. The speed-up you get from being able to short-cut these iterations is profound.
NetBeans 6 also highlights CSS errors and is a more than capable editor for most all languages a web developer is likely to use these days.
You can also use www.zbugs.com - it will help you speed up a process of compressing and gzipping your CSS and Javascript files