Cool Tools and Handy Resources for Designers this Month!

Designers are builders. From websites, to games to business cards. But every designer knows that without tools and resources, we’re getting smoked by the competition.

This month, we present you with a range of awesome new ammunition that will boosts your skills to another level. From simple design elements to overall structure, we got you covered. Take a look at these superb tools, resources, and tips you can immediately enjoy:

An Open Sourced Icon Set

Established by Waybury through a successful Kickstarter campaign, the Open Iconic set includes 223 marks available in SVG, PNG, OTF, TTF, WebP, EOT, and WOFF. It readily works with Bootstrap and Foundation and can be reduced to 8 pixels without losing legibility.

A Tasty and Light Burger

Burger is a minimalist hamburger menu with full screen navigation made by Matthew Blode (mblode). It can be installed via Bower (no external dependency) or Zip and is compatible with Safari 6.1+, IE 10+, Firefox 29+, Chrome 26+, and Opera 17+.

Forms

Typeform is an all-encompassing tool aimed at creating awesome forms for collecting and sharing data. The free Core plan allows for unlimited Typeform and response creation and includes access to the template gallery, email notifications, split-device metrics, 128-bit SSL encryption, and more.

Responsive Made Easy

The creator, James Meller, calls this “an experiment and call for a new tooling.” Made with HTML and CSS, Responsive Layouts, Responsively Wireframed is a layout that adapts to different devices and varying screen sizes. By simply clicking on the top-right buttons, you can toggle between desktop and mobile versions, allowing you to better plan you web layout.

Calculate Pixel Perfection

A calculator made for the perfectionist designers. The Responsive Calculator by Stuart Robson easily turns your awesome PSD’s pixels to the equivalent percentages for flawless responsive programming. Just key in your element; enter your desired border, margin, and padding; choose a numerical target and context; and submit the query.

Jquery Fat Text

So, you want to catch your visitor’s attention? Then get a hold of FitText by design group, Paravel. This jQuery plugin will make your font size flexible, allowing your headline to effortlessly be scaled based on input parent element. Just so you know, the group has a warning: “This is for gigantic display text only!”

A Sweet Client Review Tool

It can be tough discussing design projects with clients in real-time—the main reason why many projects take longer to complete. With this in mind, web developer and digital marketer Lucas Anderson created DesignVise, a simple but effective design, mockup, and creative asset client review tool. It allows you to share your design with a unique link, through which clients can directly place annotations.

Zero to Hero Game Developer Course

The game industry has been steadily growing in the past few years. If you want a jump start in creating desktop and mobile games, then you should consider getting this bundle from StackSocial. It’s composed 7 courses spanning 30 hours, including Beginner HTML5 Mobile Development by Pablo Navarro and Beginner iOS Game Creation by Marin Todorov.

Cards Design Based UI

Made by Mark Leusik, Steve Ives, and Jack Herbert for Teamstudio, Bootcards is a cards-based UI with dual-pane capability for mobile and desktop. It’s built on top of Bootstrap and uses its responsive features.

Awesome Media Queries

Harness the real power of JavaScript media queries for your responsive website design with Enquire.js. Made by Nick Williams, this pure JavaScript library provides callbacks for matching and umatching queries, has a clean and intuitive API, and, best of all, is absolutely lightweight—around 0.8kb minified & gzipped.

Check Your Design

Design projects can be overwhelming—but they don’t need to be. Read and take to heart the advices Adrien Heury and a host of other designers share in the Designer Checklists. Soon, you will find the serenity and harmony you need to complete a rockin’ graphic and web design project.

CSS Superpowers

Don’t tear your hair and heart out from CSS development frustration: the Rucksack is here to save the day. Made by the Simpla duo, it allows you to effortlessly create responsive typography, position offsets using shorthand methods, set aliases for long property names, and a lot more.

Freebie: 3 Super Gorgeous Text Font Effects (PSD)

Today’s daily freebie comes from Constantin Mor of St. Petersburg, Russia who specializes in creating stunning Photoshop add-ons.

Photoshop is the Holy Grail. It’s an essential and often times, preferred tool for creating awesome designs. However, there are times when crafting something from total scratch can be a pain. This is especially true if you have a lot of projects in line.

Constantin Mor understands this, and that’s the reason why he is constantly producing excellent brushes, text and photo effects, icons, and PSDs. For today’s freebie, Mor offers 3 gorgeous text font effects namely, Chromeo, Cash Bass, and Time Space from his huge 18 piece set.

Chromeo has a vintage arcade feel to it, Cash Bass will make you think of flashy casino venues, and, finally, Time Space is reminiscent of classic sci-fi movies.

Visit Mor’s Behance page to see more of his works or download the set of text effects after the jump.

Hit me 3 times

Daily Freebie: 35 Retro Vintage Graphic Elements Kit

Today’s daily freebie comes from Deal Jumbo, an awesome site that’s a golden resource for designers which combines resources from Cruzine, MIIM, and their own Jumbo Design.

Deal sites have been prevalent and continuously growing in number for the past few years. While most of them have been focused on food, fashion, and travel, unique sites that cater to more specialized niches have emerged. One of those is Deal Jumbo, which releases new promotions for graphic designers roughly three times every week. They also offer excellent freebies like fonts, mockups, and today’s highlight, designer kit.

This Retro Vintage Graphic Designer Kit is composed of 35 elements, including 20 vintage heraldry shapes, 9 grunge textures, 4 logo templates, and 2 vintage frame designs. All the elements are available in AI, EPS, and PSD for convenience and flexibility.

If you want to get more awesome graphic design freebies, hop on over to Deal Jumbo. The Retro Designer kit download link is available after the jump.

Retro Vintage Graphic Designer Kit

Daily Freebie: Slick 99Lime UI Kit for Photoshop

Today’s daily freebie comes from Joshua Gatcke, a Canadian creative director, interactive designer, and instructor. His slick UI kit will take any site from zero to hero.

Searching for a complete UI kit can be a daunting task. Joshua understands this all too well, which is why he’s created this pro UI kit, which is composed of 99 slick elements. The kit includes a range of common icons, lists, drop downs, devices, media, social media, input labels, containers, tabs, sliders, text fields, progress bars, audio players, more than any other kit out there.

There’s more stuff to go ga-ga over at 99Lime, but since you’re already here, don’t forget to get this awesome minimalist and very versatile UI kit after the jump! Thanks Josh!

Sub-Lime

15 Free Typographic Courses That Will Inspire You to Create!

Designers are curious beings. We have an innate desire to learn new things that will fuel our passions and drive us towards mastery.

For those like me, looking to learn more about typography, then consider these courses that you can start absolutely for free.

Online learning portal SkillShare is a wonderful site that offers courses in an array of categories, including design, technology, photography, and culinary. It offers premium accounts with unlimited access to all courses, but you can start an account now and get free access to whichever lesson you desire for 14 days. Courses are relatively short and are split into manageable parts, so you can easily learn at your own pace.

Similarly, Vimeo is another great resource center. Many professionals gather and share their skills through video guides and tutorials. The best thing about it? Yep their all free! For typography lovers, start your journey here:

Chalkboard Lettering: Adding Charm to Your Home

Chalkboard Lettering is a 40-minute class by Brooklyn-based designer Lauren Hom. The course is focused on creating beautiful chalk murals and includes tips for preservation, fixing, and flourishing.

The Golden Secrets of Hand-Lettering: Create the Perfect Postcard

Wanting to better express your thoughts and care for loved ones? Then learn to Create the Perfect Postcard from Martina Flor of Germany. In her course, she shares the principles behind letter design as well as effective techniques to think, sketch and create a lettering piece from scratch.

Lettering for Designers: One Drop Cap Letterform at a Time

If you take a look at old books, you will notice that a lot of them have a drop cap—a single letter with intricate designs around it. This complex drop cap letterform is the highlight in Lettering for Designers by Jessica Hische.

Calligraphy, Hand Lettering: Learn Three Styles from A-Z

Many people refrain from doing typography, thinking their lettering isn’t good enough or even downright ugly. With the Calligraphy, Hand Lettering by artist and lecturer Micheal Tonis, you will learn three lettering styles (graffiti, block, and bubble) to bring your art to the next level.

Typography Fundamentals – Feel Confident With Type!

Typography has always been and will always be a vital part of graphic design. If you want to make sure that your type complements and enhances the overall look of your design, then you ought to learn the Typography Fundamentals with Wanda Granata.

Decorative Letterforms: Creating a Hand-Drawn Alphabet

Maybe you’re looking to create and sell type sets. Or you’re designing a unique alphabet design for your story or design. Regardless of your reason, the Decorative Letterforms course by Brooklyn-based typographer Annica Lydenberg will benefit you.

Hand Lettering in Motion

Who says letters need to be just intricate and still to be fancy? In Hand Lettering in Motion, you will learn the basics of animation, including breaking hand-drawn lettering for animating in After Effects. The course is headed by motion graphics artist Jake Bartlett.

Typographic Logos: Typography and Lettering for Logo Design

When it comes to branding, logos are the most prevalent since they are easy to spot and connect with companies. While many organizations opt to use illustrations for logos, even more companies prefer typography to get their brand and message across. Learn how to craft Typographic Logos with designer Ray Dombroski.

The Golden Secrets of Script Lettering: Find Inspiration in Your Handwriting

This is another course made by Martina Flor. In the Golden Secrets of Script Lettering, you will learn how to transform spontaneous handwriting into a lettering piece, giving your writing and designs a personal touch.

Lettering with Texture: Dimensional Type with Layers and Color

In typography, dimension gives life to plain letters. Under lettersmith Jeff Rogers, who has worked for reputable brands like Nickelodeon and McDonalds, and his Lettering with Texture, you will learn how to create dimensional type using paint. You will also find out how to find great inspiration as well as get tips for sketching, painting, and layers.

Paper to Digital: Create Your Own Hand Drawn Font

Finding the perfect typeface for our projects can be tough, especially if your theme is unique or mashes genres. Fortunately, you can easily learn how to Create Your Own Hand Drawn Font, a Philadelphia-based designer and writer.

Creating Fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab

Made by Cleveland web design, branding, and print studio Go Media, this tutorial teaches the basics in Creating Fonts Using Illustrator and bringing it to Fontlab for editing and polishing.

How to Create Custom Typography

If you want to make your slogan, invitation, or other text material unique and attractive, Creating Custom Typography will be beneficial. Set aside three minutes to learn how to do it from TheVectorLab founder, Ray Dombroski.

Hand Lettering Brushes Tutorial for Illustrator

Who says creating artistic types is difficult? Designer Jeremy Child shows you an easy way to do it with his Hand Lettering Brushes Tutorial.

Adobe Photoshop Design Secrets: Fonts

Here’s the thing: simple text using basic typefaces in your library looks okay. However, if you want them to look better, then you ought to learn these Adobe Photoshop Design Secrets from Creative Cow leader Franklin McMahon.

Featured Work: The Colorful Fish Market by Micael Butial

Today’s featured work comes from Micael Butial from San Francisco. Drawing inspiration from the vibrant colors of marine life, Micael has created a fun brand showcase for this seafood market and restaurant.

Fish markets are something many people avoid mainly because of the smell. But you can’t deny the goodness of fresh seafood and its heavenly taste. For seafood lovers, the assortment of fish, shrimp, and squid are as irresistible as candy to a kid.

Keeping these things in mind, Micael sets out to create a fun and colorful brand for San Diego’s The Fish Market Seafood Restaurants. The entire corporate design includes the menu, wrapping paper, business cards, take-out bag, clips, and cute pin buttons.

Head over to see more of Micael’s work for the restaurant and other clients on his Behance page.