What’s New for Designers, July 2019

It’s hard to stay focused this time of year. With vacations coming up (or having recently passed) it’s easy to get distracted from work-related tasks. For that reason, this month’s roundup is full of design tools plus a few design diversions that you can have fun with.

404 Illustrations

Have you ever wanted to create a cool 404 page but didn’t have the time or inspiration? 404 Illustrations takes all the work out of it for you with funky and trendy illustrations for lost website users. Each illustration comes with a cute description as well and they are free to use. The designers promise more illustrations in the future.

Spotlight

Spotlight is a lightbox gallery library that’s lightweight, easy to run, and has no dependencies. It literally runs from the download without additional JavaScript, HTML snippets, additional CSS resources, images or assets, and no additional handling of dynamic content.

Eva Design System

Eva is a free and open-source design system that’s adaptable to your needs and team. It works with Sketch and provides symbols and style configurations. The system allows you to design and code using a quick process that can eliminate repetitive work.

Screenzy

Screenzy is a tool for creating and editing screenshots quickly. Just paste an image or URL and use on-screen settings to adjust the image, add text or choose from one of 5 pre-set options.

Drag and Drop Sticky

Scott Kellum created a cool drag and drop sticky note element with no JavaScript. It works as a textarea element and as you move it around, technically you are just resizing a the textarea and the “note” follows.

Freezeframe.js

Freezeframe.js lets you pause animated gifs and then reanimate on a hover, mouse click, touch event, or another manual trigger. The new version of this tool no longer uses jQuery and functions thanks to modern JavaScript.

Space Shooter

Space Shooter is a fun pen by Andrew Rubin that’s a good distraction when you are trying to work through a design problem and a fun bit of inspiration. You can build something like this. Why not make a game? Fork it and play around.

Pika CDN

Pika CDN is made for packages written in ES Module syntax, that runs natively in browser. Use it to distribute more modern, unminified packages that uses a proprietary package builder, putting everything into a ready-to-import JavaScript file. The tool is free and a pro version is on the way. (Sign up to get notified when it is ready.)

Swipemix

Swipemix will help you design better layouts and collages on Instagram. It allows you to sequence images with easy templates in just a few minutes from an app on your iPhone.

Source Wireframe Kit

Source Wireframe Kit helps you prototype faster with more than 500 blocks that can be moved, combined, and adjusted into a complete design system. Everything is grouped into categories to help you work faster and you can use it with Sketch, Figma, Marvel, or Invision to bring prototypes to life.

Hubcap

Hubcap is a free screen recorder that works without installing any software. It works with Chrome or Firefox and allows you to record a screengrab and share it instantly. You can record up to five minutes and Hubcap will store if for up to 2 weeks at no cost.

Brutalism Web Kit

Brutalism Web Kit is a collection of artboards to jumpstart website projects using this design trend. It includes 70 styles and works with free tools including Google Fonts.

Ant Design UI Kit

Any Design UI Kit is a collection of components for Figma based on the React UI library. It includes 2,100 components, 630 icons, 140 customizable styles, and 43 screens, making it one of the biggest component inventories for Figma.

Anggada

Anggada looks like it could be inspired by the title characters in recent Aladdin movie release. It includes a full character set that’s most appropriate for display use. The demo version is free and the full font is available from the typeface designer.

Basier Mono

Basier Mono is a modern style monospaced typeface with a free and family (premium) download option with square and circular shapes. The typeface is also packed with cool alternates, fractions, and supports multiple languages.

Bright Salkiy

Bright Salkiy is a scrawling script with thin lines that has the look of an elegant signature. The free version is for personal use only and includes a full character and number set.

Cataclysmo

Cataclysmo is a bold, tall slab serif for display use. It includes an uppercase-only character set and numbers.

Nairi Amber

Nairi Amber includes a regular sans serif, italic sans serif, and script character set for personal use with the free version. Each character set in the family works well together with a wide stance and rounded letterforms. The script is somewhat more compact.

Rise of Kingdom

Rise of Kingdom is an uppercase serif typeface that would be a great display option. It has a somewhat whimsical feel with tall letterforms on the thin side.

Carrie Cousins

Carrie Cousins is a freelance writer with more than 10 years of experience in the communications industry, including writing for print and online publications, and design and editing. You can connect with Carrie on Twitter @carriecousins.