Tools & Resources articles

This month we are all about tools that make life easier. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this roundup of new things for designers – from color tools to workflow enhancers to code snippets to fonts that will make you smile, everything here can make your design life easier. 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...

The WordPress community officially has Gutenberg fever. While there has been some grumbling (and not without some cause), the blocky little editor that could, has gone mainstream. People have been building, writing, collating, and generally just adapting to the changes, and I’m here to show you some of what they’ve done… Enjoy! Plugins As is usual, the WordPress community has gone wild, and has already developed loads of plugins...

Get ready to create a new list of bookmarks! The new tools featured this month are perfect for saving; some of them you’ll want to come back to over and over, such as a security checklist, cool background maker and a season-specific typeface. 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...

For many designers, Photoshop is the number one tool for editing images, but for many other designers, Photoshop is an expensive, bloated, and inefficient tool. In the last few years, the number of apps coming to market and taking a bite out of Photoshop’s fanbase has grown. Photoshop has so many built-in features that few apps can match them all. But few designers need them all. The key to finding a good alternative to Photoshop is finding...

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 UI Bundle is a search tool...

There’s been a fairly big update to Behance, also known as DeviantArt for designers. Heck, I remember when I used DA for my portfolio. Good times. Anyway… Behance. They’ve gone and updated what has to be the single most important aspect of their site: the portfolios. I mean, that’s what everybody is there for, no? They’re overhauled both the main portfolio view, as well as the experience of viewing individual projects in some small...

GitHub has made its first really big change since Microsoft acquired it a while back, and it’s a good one for small-to-medium sized design studios, freelancers, and anyone who writes front-end code for fun and profit: Free users now get unlimited private repositories. For free. No money. GitHub has always offered free public repositories, but you had to pay for the private ones; a move which encouraged the flourishing of open source software....

Happy holidays! This collection of new tools and resources is our gift to you this season. And there are plenty of holiday-themed elements sprinkled in. Enjoy! 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! Humaaans Humaaans is a design kit packed with illustrations of people...

WordPess 5.0 (codenamed “Bebo”) is officially out and prowling among the servers. This, then, is when we find out how well Gutenberg works out. And make no mistake, whatever they’ve done under the hood, this release is about Gutenberg, both technically and in the public perception. It’s almost the only thing they talk about in their own blog post about this release.  Gutenberg Automattic has set out to redefine the content editing...

Pantone’s annual quest to dominate the “and finally…” portion of the pre-festive news has kicked off, with the announcement of its Color of the Year for 2019. The official selection for the coming year is Living Coral, or specifically 16-1546 (that’s #FF6F61 to you and me). Pantone’s announcement always sets the color agenda for the following 12 months. After all, in 2018 we’ve seen nothing but Ultra Violet color schemes;...

After an extended wait, Zurb have finally released the much anticipated version 6.5 of its popular Foundation framework. (This is in place of the originally intended 6.4.4 release.) So, what has changed? Well, this is not a major release so we’re not getting CSS Grid yet, but the changelog is pretty long. The folks behind this release have grouped the changes into 3 categories: improved stability, improved accessibility, and improved...

Designers and developers are hard at work creating tons of new goodies to make work life easier. This month’s roundup of tools for designers includes a smorgasbord of resources that includes everything from productivity and collaboration tools to icon and design kits to fonts that you’ll love. 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...

Winter is coming, and so is WordPress 5.0. From some of the chatter about Gutenberg—the new content editor in WordPress—you might be led to believe that it’s worse than White Walkers. Others of us are more cautiously optimistic. We can all agree on two things: dragons are cool, and a lot of theme developers are going to have some work to do. The WordPress developers themselves are leading the way with a brand new theme they’re calling...

WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal; these are perhaps the three biggest names in the world of the consumer CMS. They are known, they are loved, they are behemoths for a good reason. There’s no escaping them. We are all WordPress, now. No, but seriously, there’s almost nothing they can’t do, with the judicious application of plugins, themes, and coding knowledge. Yeah, believe it or not, I’m not here to rag on them. Kudos to their developers....