What’s new for designers, December 2015

In this month’s edition of what’s new for designers and developers, we’ve included lots of startup apps and resources, educational resources, marketing tools, design resources, icons, WordPress tools, and much more. And as always, we’ve also included some awesome new free fonts!

Almost everything on the list this month is free, with a few high-value paid 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!

Notablist

Notablist lets you search through over 5 million email newsletter campaigns from over 400,000 publishers. You can see trends, daily digests, and more.

Iconcrafts

Iconcrafts has a huge icon library that allows you to select only the icons you need (in both stroke and fill versions). Just add the icons, pick a background (or not), customize, and download.

Stock Up

Stock Up gives you access to more than 9,000 free stock photos from 26 different websites in one place, with one search.

Engagemaster

Engagemaster lets you convert your visitors to customers through tracking, interacting, and reacting. It includes intelligent campaign targeting, personal engagement tools, and more.

Smartcasual

Smartcasual makes it much easier to network with other creative pros. It includes LinkedIn integrated profiles, a community of professionals, and more.

Trello Tasks

Trello Tasks, for Google Chrome, lets you add one simple feature to Trello: checkboxes! This turns Trello into a much more effective tasklist.

Kong

Kong is easy, free ecommerce software for creating a professional online store. It’s easy to customize, with flexible themes, and is 100% mobile ready.

Nova Icons

Nova Icons are a set of 350 free Material Design-style icons. They’re perfect for a variety of mobile apps, websites, and even desktop apps.

Seeby

Seeby is a startup marketing assistant. It helps with finding leads, tweeting relevant content, proofreading emails, and tons of other marketing tasks startups can have trouble managing.

EasyRedir

EasyRedir makes it easy to manage your URL redirects. It allows you to use marketing domains to then forward visitors to more deeply nested pages on your main site, lets you maximize your SEO, protect your brand identity, and more.

HTML to WordPress

HTML to WordPress makes it easy to convert an HTML website design into a WordPress theme. Just locate the folder you want to convert, drop it onto the website, and it will convert it for just $9/page.

ZenHub for Firefox

ZenHub for Firefox makes it easy to manage your ZenHub project management from Firefox. It includes task boards, to-do lists, burndown charts, and more.

Cast

Cast is your one-stop-shop for recording, editing, publishing, and hosting your podcast. It includes a studio for recording, an editor for perfecting it, and a publisher for making it available (with hosting and analytics at no extra charge).

Teamwave

Teamwave is a unified platform for collaboration, sales, marketing, and support. It includes project management, time tracking, contact management, reports, marketing automation, and more.

Torch

Torch is an AI platform for automating and growing your business. It includes a website builder, SEO, smart shopping cart, email marketing, inventory management, file storage, CRM, and analytics, among other features.

Color Palette Manager

The Color Palette Manager, from CoffeeCup, makes it easy to create, manage, and share all of your color palettes across apps and projects.

Azendoo

Azendoo is a Subject Calendar that lets you organize, visualize, and manage your team’s tasks. It integrates with a variety of apps, including Salesforce, HubSpot, MailChimp, GitHub, and many others.

Layers CSS

Layers CSS is a style-agnostic, unobtrusive CSS framework aimed for practical use cases. It was a small footprint, sensible defaults, progressively enhanced columns, and more.

BatchedInbox

BatchedInbox lets you schedule when your emails are delivered in Gmail. It lets you save time by scheduling emails around your workflow, and end distractions from emails coming in at random intervals.

CodeCode Ninja

CodeCode Ninja are flashcards for programmers. They’re interactive and include syntax highlighting and more.

Dewdrop.io

Dewdrop.io lets you send files in real-time for free. Just drag and drop a file to share it with anyone.

Unslider

Unslider is a simple jQuery slider. It comes with a variety of standard configurations, including an automatic slider, vertical slider, fade animations, and more.

ResponsifyJS

ResponsifyJS lets you add responsive images to your layout that adapt in real-time.

Fyuse

Fyuse 3.0 is an app for taking 3D photos. It’s easy to use and works on iOS and Android.

Figma

Figma is a collaborative interface design tool. It lets you do your design work online, with simultaneous editing, version control, and cross-platform support.

Onion Omega

The Onion Omega is an invention platform for the internet of things. It’s wi-fi enabled and supports Python, Node.JS, and other popular languages.

Avalanche

Avalanche is a super clean, Sass-based CSS grid system. It’s powerful and responsive, with real-world breakpoints and a flexible, easy naming convention.

Gridlex

Gridlex is a simple CSS grid system for quickly creating modern layouts. It’s based on Flexbox, and includes Less and Sass files.

DoneDone

DoneDone is a simple, effective issue tracker. It includes tools for everything from planning to testing.

Flexbox Froggy

Flexbox Froggy is an awesome, fun way to learn about CSS’s Flexbox properties. There are 24 lessons in all, with increasing difficulty in each one.

What Web Can Do Today

What Web Can Do Today is a quick reference for the types of features that are available in your current browser on a given day. It shows support for things like Bluetooth, offline storage, ambient light, foreground detection, battery status, and more.

Jump.js

Jump.js is a dependency-free smooth scrolling library. It’s small and modern, easy to install, and completely open source.

Uideo

Uideo has over 470 video talks for designers from 63 UX/UI conferences around the world. There are videos from Mike Monteiro, Brad Frost, Sarah Parmenter, Gary Vaynerchuk, and nearly 400 others.

Case Study Club

Case Study Club curates case studies from a variety of sources, for building tons of different kinds of products. There are case studies for UI, UX, branding, and more.

Freelance Rate Explorer

The Freelance Rate Explorer from Bonsai lets you see what the average hourly rates are for both designers and developers. You can filter based on skills, experience, and location.

Gary

Gary is a free display font based on the Art Nouveau style. It’s free for personal and commercial use.

Nazaré

Nazaré is a condensed uppercase font with hand-drawn lines and a bit of a tribal touch. It was inspired by the town of the same name in Portugal.

Logoista Bold

Logoista Bold is a font in progress. It has a hand-drawn, comic book-style look.

Rockfire

Rockfire is a geometric display font. It’s free for personal and commercial use.

Abys

Abys is an uppercase brush font originally created by Ioana Archontaki.

Fofer

Fofer is a free handwritten font. It’s simple and unique.

Scriptkulus

Scriptkulus is a unique hand-drawn typeface that’s great for signage, logos, and packaging.

Tessellate

Tessellate is a display sans serif typeface that combines geometric circles and “rivers” flowing off of some characters.

Break Fill

Break Fill is a modern sans serif typeface based on Break. In this version, all of the gaps (breaks) are filled.

Now Alt

Now Alt is an alternate version of the Now typeface, with a difference in the lowercase “a”.

Cameron Chapman

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