Tools & Resources articles

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....

Adobe’s annual MAX conference is well underway in LA, and as usual there’s a big buzz around changes to the Creative Cloud suite. Adobe’s product line often seems archaic—parts of Photoshop’s first codebase were originally painted onto the walls of caves by neanderthals—but this iterative approach also provides a solid platform to venture into new ground in ways that would bankrupt a startup. Not only has Adobe pivoted into...

 You might notice a theme this month in our collection of new tools for designers: color. There are lots of color resources sprinkled throughout this collection. But there are plenty of other goodies as well, including a beta tool from Google and some new ways to think about layouts. 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...

One of the perks of freelancing is that you can work from pretty much anywhere. However, the pressures of staying connected to work may leave you stuck behind a computer all day anyway. While there’s something to be said for the levels of productivity and output you achieve from a dedicated workspace, there’s no reason you can’t keep the momentum going while you’re out and about. The following list of tools and mobile apps will help you...

I’m not going to lie, I’ve been biased toward the Vivaldi project ever since its first release in 2015. While it has (until now) lacked the sort of polish that would make it my go-to browser on a long term basis, the developers have been chugging along steadily. Now, it’s looking pretty… well… pretty. And pretty stable/fast. Plus, Vivaldi doesn’t track any of your data unless you opt in to the sync function (more on that below). In...