The best of what’s new for designers, 2015

December 31, 2015

The best of what’s new for designers, 2015.

Every month we bring you the best new apps, frameworks, design and mobile resources, business resources, and more. Here we are at the end of 2015, and we’ve compiled a roundup of the best of what we’ve featured this year, a total of more than 70 resources, carefully curated to make sure it’s the best of the best! Almost everything on the list this year is free, with a few low-cost, high-value apps and tools also included. They’re sure to be useful to designers and developers, from beginners to experts. Check back each month in 2016 and beyond, for more resources!

Cactus

is a fast, free static website generator for Mac. Just pick a page template (portfolio, blog, or single page) to get started, and then focus on editing with live preview anywhere.

Evil Icons

is a set of open source SVG icons, plus loading spinners, that are clean and simple. They come with code to support Rails, Sinatra, Node.js, Gulp, and Grunt.

UI Tiles

is a system for building site maps and visual flowcharts for web projects, with 72 screens included. It has an elegant and light design, and it’s easy to use and customize to your needs.

Skeleton

is a simple, responsive boilerplate that’s super lightweight at roughly 400 lines. It’s quick to get started, with no installation or compiling necessary.

Material Palette

is a Material Design palette generator that’s super easy to use. Just pick two colors and you’ll get a downloadable 8‑color palette.

AndroidLibs

is a collection of libraries for Android app development. Libraries are sorted by category, or you can search to find what you need.

Isso

is a commenting server that’s similar to Disqus. Comments can be written in Markdown, and you can import comments from Disqus and WordPress, hassle-free.

Campfires.io

is a collection of interviews with your favorite designers. They share insights, tips, and behind-the-scenes stories for you to learn from.

Underdog

Looking for a job at a leading startup? Underdog lets you quickly apply to leading startups in New York, San Francisco, and those who work remotely in just 60 seconds.

AppVirality

is a growth hacking toolkit for mobile apps. Just enter your App Play Store URL to get started.

Agile Domain Search

is a powerful domain name search engine that actually looks good. Just enter a word and it will bring you back a whole list of possible domain names including that word.

Transformicons

is a set of transforming, animated icons. There are menu icons, grid icons, add/remove icons, loaders, and more.

Specfox

makes it easy to create website specifications. You can upload screens, add notes, and generate PDFs that you can share with your dev team.

Practice

lets front-end devs practice their skills by getting creative inspiration or random suggestions. You can receive a random challenge, turn a Dribbble shot into code, or solve a random Github issue.

NativeScript

lets you use JavaScript to build truly native apps. You can build apps for iOS, Android, and Windows from a single code base.

Cuckuu

lets you turn your schedule and alarms into a social game. You can use words, pictures, and videos to make your cuckuus more appealing, and you get points when you shut off a cuckuu faster.

Women Who Startup

The Women Who Startup Podcast

celebrates, connects, and empowers women founders, women who code, women entrepreneurs, and women in tech. It’s co-hosted by Lizelle van Vuuren, the Founder and CEO of Effectively and Women Who Startup, and G. Krista Morgan, Co-founder and CEO of P2Binvestor.

Stripe Connect

is a new offering from Stripe for marketplaces and platforms who need to get their users paid. If offers multi-party payments, full control, and it’s completely scalable up to billions of dollars per year in payments.

Brick by Brick

is a free guide for building communities. It includes information on audience, seeding, engagement, email, promotion, moderation, recycling, value, and voice.

#Launch

is a community of like-minded makers, designers, developers, and entrepreneurs that was founded in 2006 and re-launched this year. It started out as a secret community of 20 members that spawned 5 Y‑Combinator founders, a Thiel Fellow, and dozens of startups, but now you can join.

Funnel

lets you easily create contact forms, track deals, send proposals, track customers, and more. It even works with Gmail.

Trianglify Generator

The Trianglify Generator lets you create a custom images based on triangles and color gradients. You can adjust the width and height of the final image, as well as adjust the variance in triangle shapes, the cell size, and the color palette.

Beagle

is a tool for creating better proposals that lets you import content to base your proposals on existing ones. It also has tools for collaboration, and lets you send directly to your client with a custom cover letter.

Ways We Work

interviews a variety of founders and creatives on how they work. It includes questions about the tools they use, how they stay on top of email, and more.

Visual Studio Code

is a free app for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. It works on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

AppLandr

makes it easy to create beautiful landing pages for iOS and Android apps. It puts the focus on marketing, saves you hours of time, and they offer ²⁴⁄₇ support.

Invoice.to

is an incredibly quick and easy way to set up up and send an invoice. You can connect with with Stripe for easy payments, and then either send or print your invoice.

Custom vs. Template

This questionnaire helps you decide whether to create a Custom vs. Template website design. Just check off your requirements and it’ll tell you which option fits best.

Makerbook

is a curated directory of some of the best free resources for designers and other creatives. It has categories for photography, mockups, fonts, textures, video, audio, and more.

Great Email Copy

is a Tumblr blog that collects awesome emails from around the web. You can filter by type of tag, and it even points out why each email was included.

DeployBot

is a simple app for deploying code anywhere. You can trigger deployments automatically or manually.

IconStore

offers free icon packs from world class designers. There are dozens of sets available.

Teachery

lets you create and sell beautiful online courses quickly and easily, with no design or development skills required. Just sign up, create a course, add lessons, style it, create an order page, and you’re ready to start selling!

Foundry

is a collection of vector assets for designing mobile apps and other interactive designs. It includes a variety of images, from browser chrome to everyday objects, any or all of which can be downloaded.

Webdesigner News

is a news aggregator that lets you see the latest news in the design world, as well as check out the most voted, most shared, and most clicked. You can even sign up for an account to save your favorites.

Lrn

lets you learn to code at your convenience on your smartphone. It includes fun interactive mini-quizzes that teach you.

Prototyp

makes it quick and easy to create interactive prototypes. It’s built on Framer.js.

BlackStock

offers up free and affordable stock images that aren’t white-centric. They offer images for both web and print projects, and all the images are royalty-free.

The Working Lunch

is a daily collection of helpful content for starting and growing a business, aimed at reading or watching on your lunch break.

NoDesk

features a curated collection of resources for the digital nomad. If your work is location independent, NoDesk is sure to have some useful tools for you.

Rucksack

is a collection of CSS features like responsive typography and property aliases that’s built on PostCSS. It’s modular and lightning fast.

Frontify Style Guide

lets you create free style guides for your projects quickly and easily. You can include logos, images, color palettes, typography, and much more.

Bonsai

offers free, bulletproof contracts. It includes simple e‑signing and integrated escrow, too.

Color Hunt

serves up beautiful color palettes every day. You can also see popular palettes, or suggest your own.

GMass

is a mass email system for Gmail. You can create instant recipient lists, track opens, and personalize based on names and email addresses, among other features.

The Freelancer Podcast

is a short, weekly podcast for designers, developers, and writers. It’s hosted by Paul Jarvis of Creative Class.

Webflow

is the world’s first visual CMS for building custom, dynamic websites. You can easily structure your content, create custom designs, edit right on the page, and more.

Vectr

is a free design app for print and web. You can download the desktop version, or use it right in your browser.

Primer

is a free app that teaches you marketing lessons from Google. They add new topics every week, and they use a learn-by-doing approach.

Growth Hacking Experiments Template

This Growth Hacking Experiments Template lets you try out growth hacking strategies that have been refined across more than 1200 startups. It breaks down everything into a step-by-step process for trying these growth hacks on your own projects.

Workmanship Manual

The Workmanship Manual gives guidelines for writing front-end code that’s reliable and easy to maintain. It includes guidelines for HTML, CSS, and more.

Blend

lets you choose from standard color palettes (Flat UI, Material Design, etc.) to create a CSS gradient. It’s easy to use and you can quickly grab the code for your projects.

WP Email Delivery

is managed email delivery for WordPress. It works with any plugin that sends through WP-mail.

Fundamental UI Design

is a free weekly email course that teaches key UI design topics.

Landing.Jobs

helps you find a great tech job by showing curated offers, rather than just a list of random job openings.

Seeby

is a startup marketing assistant. It helps with finding leads, tweeting relevant content, proofreading emails, and tons of other marketing tasks startups can have trouble managing.

Azendoo

is a Subject Calendar that lets you organize, visualize, and manage your team’s tasks. It integrates with a variety of apps, including Salesforce, HubSpot, MailChimp, GitHub, and many others.

BatchedInbox

lets you schedule when your emails are delivered in Gmail. It lets you save time by scheduling emails around your workflow, and end distractions from emails coming in at random intervals.