We use a many tools for our design, from compex to simple. You may find these links helpful.
Macromedia Studio - We use the Macromedia Studio MX 2004 suite for most of our work. It is a well-integrated studio that allows us to create almost anything we can imagine.
Paintshop Pro 7 - Jasc's excellent paint program is our primary raster image-editing tool. Simple and effective, it doesn't get in the way of our creative impulses.
Color Wheel Pro - Color Wheel Pro helps us find colors that blend well with one another.
WinSyntax - Winsyntax is a very simple text editor with syntax highlighting. We use this for most script editing and hand coding.
FrontPage - We use Microsoft's FrontPage for creating sites that the client may want to update themselves. Because of its integration with the popular Office series, FrontPage is easy to pick up.