Blocs – A new website designer app

Blocs is a new website designer app from the team that brought us Dev Rocket and other Photoshop plugins. It’s a new website design tool for Macs that allows the designer to build websites very quickly and easily.

At kc web design we like using responsive web design frameworks and our favourite is Bootstrap created by the Twitter team. Now in version 3, Bootstrap makes creating responsive website designs very easy and gives you a great foundation to build your unique website design onto.

The new Blocs website designer app uses Bootstrap as the code base so we know its going to create a website with good editable code on a trusted framework. The beauty of the Blocs app is in its interface and ease of use. Its very minimal, giving you just the right amount of tools to be able to create your layout. You can select from pre-built templates for things such as navigation, hero banners, social media, icon blocks and so on or create your own gridded column based layouts. If you stick to the template based layout you can end up with a website design that looks a lot like all the other out there but with some time and a designers eye you can create unique layouts.

Adding images, changing colours, creating forms and blocks of text are all made very easy by the simple and fluid UI design. Integrated icon fonts from Font Awesome also make things very easy when it comes to changing and adding icons. All of this makes for a very good simple website design app that allows web designers to create Bootstrap based websites very quickly. It even makes a brilliant tool for wire framing and designing in the browser as you can create and change designs so quickly.

It won’t suit everyone or all web design projects but for those it does suit it turns out to be a very handy tool indeed!

Even though it was only released a week ago there has already been a number of updates and Norm the developer has told me new features, such as dropdown menu support in the main nav, will be added soon.

One issue I did have was the way changing colours works. It doesn’t feel very intuitive in its current state and when I thought I was changing a colour for a block element I ended up changing a global colour value instead. One way round this is to define your colour swatches first so that you just pick from those rather than the colour picker.

Hats of to Norm, Blocs is a great app and I can’t wait to see how it improves.