Design Tools
- Figma
Figma replaced our Illustrator workflow literally overnight. - Canva
Improve your social media content with simple templates. Great for Instagram Reels and TikTok. - Webflow
Are you a designer with no formal web design experience? Webflow is what you want. Like Figma, it’s drastically changing the landscape of frontend design and development. - Remove.bg
Don’t have photoshop? Remove a background in seconds. - Experte Background Remover
Works like remove.bg, but allows you to download a high resolution file for free and without registration. - Miro
A more comprehensive whiteboard option compared to Figjam. It gets a lot of use internally for design feedback.
Typography
- Typewolf
The OG typography guru. A great source for inspiration and trend research. - Friends of Type
A personal journal from it’s creators exploring typographic design and lettering - Alphabettes
Alphabettes.org is a showcase for work, commentary, and research on lettering, typography, and type design - WhatTheFont!
What font is that? Works most of the time, and gets you really close even when it doesn’t. - Adobe Fonts
Font managing sucks, but Adobe Fonts makes it pretty simple.
Figma Plugins
- Mockuuups Studio
Our favorite mockup plugin for Figma. - Blush
Create and customize illustrations in your designs with Blush. - Image Tracer
Quickly create vectors from graphic elements. Genuinely works better than Illustrator’s tracing options for simple designs.
- SmoothShadow
A personal favorite, because I still use the original for web work. - Unsplash
2 million free high-resolution images. - Selective Surgery
Bulk editing made easy.
Marketplaces
- Creative Market
Great resource for finding high quality design elements. - True Grit Texture Supply
High quality textures, brushes and templates for Photoshop, Illustrator and Procreate. - GARM Co.
The Graphic Artist Resource Merchant Company is a platform for people to find digital resources like educational video classes, brush sets, texture packs, fonts and other designer goodies. - Studio 2am
A independent market for premium creative assets, effects and templates.
Color
- Huemint
An incredibly powerful tool that uses machine learning to create unique color schemes. - @color.nerd
A color nerd on Tiktok, for all your really nerdy color needs. - Picular
The color of anything. - Adobe Color Wheel
A comprehensive color tool from your friends at Adobe. - Coolors
An extensive color palette generator. - Canva Color Palette Generator
Extract a color palette from your photos.
Optimization
- TinyPNG
TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your WEBP, JPEG and PNG files. - reSmush.it
reSmush.it is a free API that provides image optimization. - Nano – Compress SVGs
Did you know you can minify your SVGs? Now you do. The file size for the header graphic on this page was cut in half using Nano.
- Adobe PDF Compressor
Much like compressing your SVGs, you can and should probably be compressing your PDFs. No one needs a 10mb resume.
Web Design
- Hero Patterns
A collection of repeatable SVG background patterns for you to use on your web projects. - Smooth Shadow
Make the smoothest CSS shadows known to man. - Shadow Palette Generator
The new hotness. Create a set of lush, realistic CSS shadows. Tinted shadows? Uh yes. - Shader Park
Shader Park is an open source web-based platform and community for creating real-time 3D graphics and animations using code.
- Plain Pattern
An SVG based seamless pattern maker. - CSS Gradients
Simple CSS gradient generator.
Inspiration
- Savee
It’s like ffffound but for 2022 (RIP ffffound). Follow us. - Booooooom
The OG art and design blog is still growing strong. - Awwwards
Web design inspiration. - Designspiration
Another pin board style inspiration resource. - Abduzeedo
Abduzeedo is a collective of individual writers sharing articles about design, photography, and UX.
