What’s new for designers, June 2014

The June edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, frameworks, grid systems, game platforms, inspirational resources, Photoshop plugins, text editors, and some really great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments. And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.

Scribe

Scribe is a rich text editor framework built and open-sourced by The Guardian. It patches for browser inconsistencies and includes sensible defaults.

Card

Card is a single line of code that can make your credit card forms much more user-friendly. It’s built with pure CSS, HTML, and JS (no images), and includes animations for 4 different card types.

Simple Sharing Buttons Generator

The Simple Sharing Buttons Generator makes it easy to create HTML sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and more. There are several styles to choose from and it’s completely free.

PlayCanvas

PlayCanvas is an easy to use WebGL Game Engine that’s free, open source, and includes collaborative development tools.

Kivo

Kivo makes it easy to annotate PowerPoint or PDF presentations. Just drag and drop your file to upload and get started.

The Awesome Free Toolbox

The Awesome Free Toolbox is a collection of awesome web design tools that includes resources for images, templates, and even hosting.

Griddify

Griddify makes it quick and easy to create custom grid systems with vertical rhythm in Photoshop. It works in Photoshop CS6/CC (though there are bugs in CS6).

Screenshotter

Screenshotter is a free iOS app for organizing your mobile screenshots. It automatically separates your photos from your screenshots, makes it easy to share and archive shots, and lets you arrange them in folders, among other features.

Dept. of Design Web Field Manual

The Dept. of Design Web Field Manual, Summer 2014 edition, is a curated, categorized collection of some of the best resources out there for web design.

The Day’s Color

The Day’s Color is a color digest with regularly updated palettes inspired by a variety of things, including objects, music, and more.

A to Z CSS

A to Z CSS is a weekly podcast covering a variety of CSS topics. Each episode is short (generally between 4 and 7 minutes), making them easy to actually learn from.

Tumblr Boilerplate

This Tumblr Boilerplate is a simple starting point for creating a great Tumblr theme. It includes post type support, it’s HTML5 based, and it’s optimized for speed.

30 Weeks

30 Weeks is an experimental educational program that aims to give talented designers the tools, mentorship, experience, and other resources they need to start companies and create products that could change the world. While it’s an innovative program, it’s also not cheap: $10,000 (though there are merit and need-based scholarships available).

Get Shit Done

Get Shit Done is a collection of free design elements, including buttons, menus, navigation, typographic styles, notifications, JavaScript components and more. There’s also a paid pro version with more resources.

Pho Devstack 1.0

The Pho Devstack is an automated workflow for front-end developers. It includes tools for compiling, minifying, CSS prefixing, and more.

Filament

Filament is an app “store” for your website that lets you easily install free apps on your site with a drag-and-drop interface, no code required.

Cody

Cody is a free collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript snippets for your website. So far there are snippets for navigation, intros, shopping carts, and more.

Dimensions Toolkit

The Dimensions Toolkit is a Chrome Extension for testing responsive websites that works offline, is refresh-friendly, and lets you add custom breakpoints. There’s also an online version.

Framer.js

Framer.js is a prototyping toolkit to turn static mockups into animated and interactive prototypes.

Tiny PMS Match

Tiny PMS Match is a Tumblr blog that matches up small objects with their Pantone colors. All the photos are taken with an iPhone 5 and edited with Snapseed.

randomColor

randomColor is a JavaScript color generator. Unlike other color generators, though, by default it only generates “attractive colors”, eliminating grays, browns, and murky greens.

Famo.us

Famo.us is a free, open source JavaScript app framework. It includes an open source 3D layout engine, a 3D physics animation engine, and more.

Flexbox Grid

The Flexbox Grid is a grid system based on the “flex” display property. It’s responsive, fluid, has a simple syntax, and much more.

Weblox

Weblox is a simple webpage template builder that lets you easily build fully responsive pages based on Bootstrap.

Spritebox

Spritebox is a WYSIWYG tool for creating CSS from sprite images. You can generate sprites, combine spritesheets, and more.

Finch

Finch is a tool for viewing local websites on any internet connected device. Just install the app and get a temporary public URL for your local project, secured with SSL.

Respondly

Respondly is a team inbox for email and Twitter, perfect for customer support, team workflows, and more. It’s free to try, with plans starting at just $9/month.

Mailparser.io

Mailparser.io lets you extract data from your emails to automate your workflow. There’s a 30-day free trial available, with paid plans starting at $19/month.

Jeet

Jeet is a grid system built for the way humans read things, rather than the way machines do. It eliminates needlessly nesting elements, rigid column rules, and more.

Kickoff

Kickoff is a lightweight front-end framework for building responsive sites. It’s built with Sass and Grunt, and is fully documented.

Great Talks

Great Talks is a collections of exceptional speeches and presentations from conferences all over the world. While they’re not all strictly design-focused, they virtually all discuss creativity.

Oozled

Oozled is a curated collection of creative resources from all over the web. There are categories for typography, icons, CMSs, inspiration, conferences, color, and more.

uKeeper

uKeeper makes it easy to save full webpages. Just sign up and then email links to uKeeper and have them automatically sent to your regular email or an app email (like Evernote or Instapaper).

Source Serif Pro (free)

Source Serif Pro is an open source serif typeface from Adobe that comes in regular, semibold, and bold weights.

Hairvetica (free)

Hairvetica is a decorative vector font that looks like stylized hair, available as an Illustrator file.

Uni Sans Free (free)

Uni Sans Free comes in four caps weights, including a Cyrillic alphabet. More styles and weights are available in the full family.

Sideshow ($10)

Sideshow is inspired by sign painting, ideal for announcing big events or anything important. It also comes with 40 special graphic-glyphs, too.

ATC Overlook ($10)

ATC Overlook is a fusion of geometric and grotesque styles with over 370 glyphs in seven weights.

Lastra ($10)

Lastra is a 3D, all-caps display font inspired by lettering in cafes and restaurants. It also includes custom flourishes as special characters.

Beelzebrush ($35)

Beelzebrush is a is an eight-font family inspired by heavy metal. It comes in regular, italic, alt, and alt italic with rough shapes and edges, while the heavier weights have more uniform edges.

Reverse Gothic JNL ($25)

Reverse Gothic JNL has a vintage reversed letterpress look that’s great for designing cool headlines.

Newark JNL ($47.50)

Newark JNL is a stylized slab serif typeface based on vintage alphabet game tile pieces. There are some quirky letter widths that make it stand out.

Lugatype (free)

Lugatype is a quirky display typeface great for posters, signage, magazines, and more.

Know of a new app or resource that should have been included but wasn’t? Let us know in the comments!

Cameron Chapman

Cameron Chapman is a freelance writer and designer from New England. You can visit her site or follow her on Twitter.