This cool post on Design Vitality lists a bunch of sites and tools for website designers including:

• open source web design programs
• website templates & css layouts
• automated CSS tools and generators
• blog themes & templates

I’ve used Backpack for over a year in an effort to get better organized. Believe me, I need a lot of help and it does a terrific job.

All of my calendars, to-do lists, personal project notes, and random bits, are in my Backpack account.

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Colorjack is a cool open source color picker DHTML tool that allows you to add a color picker to your web project.

Another related plugin (seemingly still under development) is Sphere, which is a color picker based on a color wheel.

Check out moe cool Javascript Design Tools and widgets.=

This spiffy Stripe Generator tool makes it super easy to create seamless, efficient, striped backgrounds.

Drop the generated images in your designs for that fab Web 2.0 -ey look.

A friend told me to check out Launchy, which is a cool Open Source tool for Windows that allows you to launch programs, bookmarks, files and more with a few keystrokes.

I’m hooked.