What’s New for Designers, January 2019

New year, new design tools. As your start regrouping and reorganizing in 2019, why not make good on those resolutions and try a new design element or two. We’ve got plenty to choose from here. If we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments. And if you know of a new app or resource that should be featured next month, tweet it to @carriecousins to be considered!

UI Bundle

is a search tool to help you find fonts, icons, UI kits, mockups and more design goodies. You can browse options right on the home screen or use the search bar to find the perfect set of tools. And the best part? All of the tools and resources are free to download and use. 

Rakuten RapidAPI

helps you discover and connect to APIs in the world’s largest hub. Search for popular, recommended or task specific APIs, test in-browser and connect using code snippets. Plus, you can manage it all from a single dashboard. 

Free Image and Photo Resizer

gets your images ready for website and social media use without expensive software. Just upload your image and the tool will create a crop that fits common social media channels and web specifications. You can also create custom sizes. 

SVG Gradient Map Filter

is a nifty little tool that puts a great color overlay on images. You can use ready-made palettes or edit them and get yours. 

WebsiteVoice

turns text into high-quality audio for users who want to listen to your content. (We all know that voice interfaces are all the rage!) Voice interfaces can increase user engagement, accessibility and help grow followers and subscribers to content. The tool is customizable and free. 

Screen.Guru

takes all the guesswork out of creating clean website screenshots. Just enter a URL and get a grab that you can use in projects. 

Blobmaker

helps you create trendy bubbles and blobs for website designs. With plenty of settings to tweak this is as fun to play with as it is useful. 

Pika

is a ​“search engine” for finding modern packages on npm. You can browse and search for smaller, faster JavaScript bundles. 

UI Sounds

shows what a noisy place the internet has become. It’s a collection of all the beeps, dings and ditties that are part of our everyday browsing habits. 

Magic Sketchpad

uses machine learning to finish your doodles and sketches. It’s pretty addictive to play with. 

Essentials Icon Pack

is a set of common icons that work for pretty much every project. The tool from InVision is based on their most popular icons and includes 140 icons. 

Vector Icons

Freebiesbug has a set of 150 vector icons that are free to try. The set includes plenty of icons in multiple categories – weather, music, health, food and more – in colored, outline and monochromatic options. Each comes in AI, EPS and PNG format for easy customization and scalable use. 

UI Logos

is a collection of free professional logo placeholders for projects. There are more than 25 logos and a plugin to help you get elements that will make your mockups look more polished. It works with Sketch and Adobe XD. 

Space Marble Backgrounds

is a fun set of background images with a design that’s out of this world! The collection includes 12 handmade options for a variety of project types. 

Social Meet Up UI Kit

is a free collection of Adobe XD with more than 80 screens in six categories to speed up your workflow for projects. Everything is customizable and comes with a pretty nifty color and typography palette that you can use (or not). 

Design Camera

is an app for your Mac that lets you create, capture and animate 3D mockups for your digital designs in a matter of seconds. Designers from Shopify, Google, Starbucks, Uber, Sketch and Dropbox are already in the beta. 

CSS Puns

is sure to make you giggle … if you understand code anyway. Play with the tool only or buy merchandise if there’s a pun you really like. 

Material Design Palette Generator

pulls the colors of Material Design out of Google’s documentation for easy use. Turn a hex code into a full palette right on the screen. 

Alvaro

is a condensed sans serif display font that’s made to be big. It includes 221 characters in an uppercase style. 

Classical Monoline Script

is a fun and readable script that has a neutral feel. It includes beautiful upper- and lowercase options as well as alternates, ligatures and swashes. 

Honeymoon Avenue Serif Font

is a modern style serif with alternating thin and thick stroke widths. It’s a little on the thin side and is easy to read. The free version includes uppercase letters. 

PT Root

is part of the PT Root typeface family. It includes four styles of normal proportions intended for screen reading, interfaces, websites and wayfinding systems. PT Root is a modern uniwidth sans serif whose individual character widths are constant across all weights. 

Soulcraft

is a free OpenType variable font designed with the idea of emulating vernacular lettering. You can change the width and slant of each individual character without relying on pre-defined font weights. 

The Rustic

is a simple uppercase display typeface in a fun style. It includes alternates for an interesting look.