What’s new for designers, December 2014

In this month’s edition of what’s new for designers and developers, we’ve included new apps for design, frameworks and boilerplates, new mobile apps and design resources, JavaScript resources, resources for startups, and much more. And as always, we’ve also included some awesome new fonts!

Almost everything on the list this month is free, with a few low-cost, high-value apps and tools also included. They’re sure to be useful to designers and developers, from beginners to experts.

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 @cameron_chapman to be considered!

Foundation for Apps

Foundation for Apps is a front-end framework for creating fully responsive web apps. You can use it for creating things like email apps, music apps, productivity apps, and more.

PaymentFont

PaymentFont is an SVG web font that includes icons for all the main payment and credit card processors and methods. There are 74 icons included.

Fontspiration

Fontspiration is a typography inspiration app for iOS. You can browse creative typography, find fonts, and create fun animated typography gifs or videos.

Material Up

Material Up is a material design gallery that offers up daily inspiration for websites, mobile apps, and concepts.

Charted

Charted is a new charting app from Medium. Just paste in a link to a Google Spreadsheet or CSV file and Charted does its thing, creating an interactive chart with your data.

Gyroscope

Gyroscope is an app for creating a personal website that’s powered by the things you do online and the apps you use, displaying data from each.

Frameless

Frameless is a browser for iOS 8 that’s built for designers and developers to preview prototypes on iOS devices. It has a transparent UI with no browser chrome or status bar, and offers customizable gestures.

Tindddle

Tindddle is like Tinder for Dribbble. It makes it easy to discover great work and inspiration.

Four Shadows

Four Shadows lets you create shadows on your icons that change with the time of day, so they match the hour hand on an analog clock.

Lining.js

Lining.js gives you down-to-the-line control over CSS styling. So you can apply styles to specific lines, much like the “first-line” CSS selector.

Hanno’s Playbook

Hanno’s Playbook covers the complete workflow and process for designers at Hanno. It’s a great resource and example of transparency in the design world.

Pixact.ly

Pixact.ly is a fun online tool for seeing just how well you know your pixels and dimensions. It gives you a specific length and width of box to draw, and scores you based on how close you get.

CSS Dig

CSS Dig is a Chrome extension that lets you analyze your CSS in new ways, including refactoring and consolidating it.

Website Style Guide Resources

Website Style Guide Resources is a list of articles and other resources for creating better style guides.

Blocs

Blocs is a simple Mac app for creating responsive, modern, static websites without writing code. It’s fast and intuitive, uses Bootstrap 3, includes a curated list of Google Web Fonts, and even has retina support.

Ocean

Ocean is a community for designers to share feedback with one another. You can join with Twitter to upload your own designs or leave feedback for others.

Zion

Zion is a set of icons designed for OS X Yosemite’s refined visual language. It creates a system-wide consistency that’s lacking in the default icons.

Vivus

Vivus is a JS class that lets you animate SVGs, to appear that they’re being drawn. There are three styles of animation: delayed, asynchronous, and one-by-one.

Rinse.io

Rinse.io is an exclusive photography and portfolio community, that aims to showecase great photographic stories by both established and emerging artists.

Atomic

Atomic is interface design software that that includes built-in prototyping and collaboration tools.

Firefox Developer Edition

Firefox Developer Edition is a browser made specifically for developers. It includes pixel-perfect coding tools and tools for debugging in any browser.

Material UI

Material UI is a CSS framework a set of React components that uses Google’s material design.

Merry Icons

Merry Icons is a set of hand-drawn Christmas icons. There are 12 icons in the free set, including a Santa, Christmas tree, ornament, lights, candle, snowflake, stocking, gift, and more. They come as AI, EPS, PSD, and PNG files, in four sizes.

Postatic

Postatic is a platform for creating a HackerNews-like community. You can control the look of the site, as well as how the site is accessed by your community.

Stitches

Stitches is an HTML5 sprite sheet generator that uses a drag and drop interface.

Venngage

Venngage is an easy way to create and publish infographics, data visualizations, and reports, with hundreds of charts and icons available.

Prototyping Tools

Prototyping Tools is a chart comparing prototyping tools, to help you choose the best one for your design needs. It includes columns for output, gestures, terms, and more.

PrivacyPal

PrivacyPal is a simple way to see the terms and conditions for any website just by entering the URL.

Framer

Framer is an open source, innovative prototyping and experimentation JavaScript framework that lets you define animations and interactions.

Qards

Qards is a set of pre-designed cards that you can use together to create a website, with no need to design or code.

Designer’s Guide to DPI

The Designer’s Guide to DPI is an introductory read for designers who want to better understand cross-DPI and cross-platform design.

StartupQuote

StartupQuote features quotes from various startup founders. There are quotes from everyone from Ian MacAllister of Amazon to Satya Nadella of Microsoft to Travis Kalanick of Uber included.

Pantone Color of the Year 2015

Pantone Color of the Year 2015 has been announced. Marsala is a more muted and sophisticated hue than some in recent years.

SWAPI

SWAPI is the Star Wars API with all the Star Wars data you could ever want. It includes data on the planets, spaceships, vehicles, people, and more.

Galaktika Gravity

Galaktika Gravity is a futuristic display font with a bit of a handdrawn quality.

Propaganda

Propaganda is a visually strong display font that started out being designed for a tshirt logo.

Leathery

Leathery is a free display font with a handmade, vintage feel. It includes three different fonts (smallcaps, uppercase, and capslock) with 402 total glyphs.

BlackDrops

BlackDrops) was created for a project for a Metalcore band, Black Drops Remains, and later expanded into a complete font.

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Mad Squire

Mad Squire is an experimental geometric typeface that includes uppercase and lowercase alphabets, plus alternative letter sets.

Pribambas

Pribambas has an organic feel, and comes in uppercase Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.

Quarz 974 Black

Quarz 974 Black is a free display font with a strong geometric style.

Delicate

Delicate is a stylized serif display font, with a mix of barely-there and very strong strokes.

Fantazyor

Fantazyor is a free display font with a funky, cartoonish style that’s perfect for titling and the like.

Cameron Chapman

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