Having just finished months of work on a large responsive web project launch,  I thought it'd be cool to do a little round-up of some of my favourite tools and tutorials that I enjoyed or made use of. As a designer, implementing complex jquery or php can be frustrating at times, but luckily there are plenty of great resources to help get the job done.


Gridiculous
This is a sweet responsive CSS boilerplate grid system that I used for site structure. By the end of the design there wasn't too much left of it that hadn't been modified, but it was a great way to start, and helped to simplify the responsive design process down.

Flexslider
Flexslider is one of the best and most popular sliders out there. Easy to implement and easy to customize.

CSS MenuMaker
Some good starting points for nav menus here...quicker than designing completely from scratch if you like to play around with things.

Mobile Menu
Handy method of converting whatever your top nav menu is to an expanding icon based top menu on mobile.

Accordion
A cool tutorial on an animated accordion style dropdown lists/menu...useful for customizing for any content that you don't need to be visible right away.

Camera Gallery
Nice and straightforward, easy to implement full screen responsive gallery with carousel. Plenty of options as far as tweaking speed and animation

Tigra Calendar
If you need a quick datepicker, this is the item for you. Drop it in to your classes quick and you're ready to go. The actual jquery datepicker script is a cool product itself, and not hard to work with either. So if you are planning on making a lot of customizations, or need code that's more workable, i would use that instead.

Active menu PHP
The more I use php, the more I like it. Beyond your basic includes, it has some handy uses. Usually in a small site you can indicate the active link in the nav menu by adding a different class, but in a larger menu you want php to take care of that for you. Use the couple lines of code here and you're all set