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.
