10 Excellent Resources & Tools Every Designer Should Know

I have a public service announcement for creative entrepreneurs:

Designers are the most under-appreciated group of creators.

As a designer, I may be a bit biased… Okay, I am for sure biased, but we are living in an incredible era where design is at the core of the world’s largest industries.

Always there, but often ignored, designers play a role in your favorite products, life-changing technologies, and even your ability to read this article. On top of being the architects of our visual world, designers are creating free software and resources to help up-and-coming designers design better.

If you are a designer, content creator, or creative entrepreneur, these resources I have collected will help you bring your ideas to life. Many of them I found through platforms like ProductHunt. I tagged the creators so be sure to buy them a coffee and say thanks after reading.

#1 Color Selector by Eugénie Garcia

To be honest, I hate stale color palette sites. The mechanical color wheel that uses the hex color code feels sterile and lifeless. They make color feel like math. A bunch of “this plus this equals that”. Where’s the soul?

Colors are life and I want to feel inspired when I see them.

Color Selector is a database that offers a wide variety of color combinations taken from images in trending fashion, interior design, architecture, abstract paintings, and more. While the site is limited in its number of palettes, they offer a great range of colors that you can use for your projects.

#2 Checklist Design created by George Hatzis

Created by Australian designer and maker George Hatzis, Checklist Design is a checklist for anything design-related. Need to create a pricing page for your website? Use Checklist Design to manually check off necessary elements for the page.

This is a tool to help you remember the most important parts of your designs. Also included are designs for inspiration, article tutorials, and live examples.

#3 Velvetyne Type Foundry by Frank Adebiaye

Sorry to do this to my designer friends, but here is yet another site for free fonts. I know. I know. Your font library is a mile long. But as opposed to having 10 different types of ‘Helvetica’, Velvetyne Type Foundry produces fonts you’ve never seen before.

Since 2010, they have designed free and open source typefaces for truly creative projects. You can use, modify and redistribute them freely.

#4 ColorSlurp by the team at Idea Punch

The self-proclaimed “best Mac color picker in the universe,” ColorSlurp gives other eyedropper color finders a run for their money. A great color tool for developers and designers. ColorSlurp uses a high-precision magnifier, to select any color on your screen.

Using powerful color editing capabilities, you can create and organize palettes, check color contrast for optimal accessibility, and on iOS, use your camera to select colors, export, iCloud sync, and much more!

#5 Shape by the team behind Design+Code

A (growing) library of 36,400+ fully customizable illustrations, icons, and animated designs. Quickly customize and export your icons and illustrations with their custom web editor.

#6 Really Good Emails

We all receive dozens of emails every day, some good and some bad. Really Good Emails has curated a library of the best emails from the world’s top companies. Find inspiration for your newsletter design, onboarding process, and automation flow with their feed of 9,000+ emails.

#7 Cleanmock by Tekeste Gebreanenia and Johny Vino

Cleanmock makes it simple and quick to generate stunning mobile or web app device mockups directly from your browser. It is extremely fast and simple to use. With only a few clicks, you can have your mockups appear clean and professional. They have cut the price of the pro version as part of their early-stage launch, so you can take advantage of this beta discount.

#8 Unscreen

Remove the background from any video. It’s really as simple as that. A great tool to use should you want to create custom GIFs and video presentations.

#9 Power People Platform by Lisa Brödlin

Perfect for mockups, user personas, presentations, and profile pics (should you find your doppelgänger), Power People Platform delivers a design library of 3D avatars. Lisa designed these to have their own styles and personalities. I guarantee you have not seen characters like these.

Provided are 12 original characters, 3 different skin colors, 6 hair colors, 5 dresses, 23 dress colors, and endless Background colors.

The Power People bundle comes in high-resolution (2000px/2000px) Photoshop files to give you a lot of flexibility for your creativity.

#10 Shapefest by Joseph Angelo Todaro

My man Joseph created Shapefest, an incredible library of free 3D shapes for UI design, motion design, web design, presentations, and whatever else you can imagine.

Voted #1 Product of the Day on ProductHunt, one reviewer asked “But… why free?! These are worth hundreds of dollars as a premium creative resource?”

I totally agree, but if I were you, I would just take the blessing and know that designers like Joseph use their gifts for the good of the people. So take moment to upvote Shapefest, support Joseph, and other designers like him.