What’s New for Web Designers – Nov. 2010

New apps and websites seem to be appearing on an almost daily basis, but trying to find the good ones among them can be tough, especially considering how many are not that great.

That’s why every month we research and showcase some of the best and latest resources available for web designers.

Here’s the newest installment of what’s new for web designers in the past few weeks. This month we’ve covered everything from new fonts to useful web apps to some new resources for you to use in your own designs, all recently launched!

As always, if we’ve missed something, let us know in the comments. And if you know of an app you’d like included in the next roundup, please tweet it to @cameron_chapman.

Please feel free to share your views on the products and services that we’re featuring this month, in the comments area below…

The Great Typekit Table

Sleepover has published this chart that shows us which Typekit fonts are good for long blocks of text. In addition to listing appropriate fonts, it also tells us whether the fonts are OK for Windows, whether they include extra weights and opticals, and more. All the fonts included had to meet certain criteria: they had to be available in bold, italic, and bold italic styles, and they couldn’t be handwriting, script or monospace.

Instagram

Instagram is a new camera app for iPhone. It’s free, and lets you snap a photo and then apply filters to it before sharing it via Facebook, Twitter or Flickr.

Curio 7

Curio 7 is the newest version of the Curio app for Mac, which allows for better organization of creative projects. This version adds a bunch of new features, and is easier to use than previous versions.

Sublime Video

Sublime Video is a new embeddable HTML5 video player, still in private beta. It will be a paid app once the beta is over, but aims to be more cost-effective than free apps by removing the need to manage or maintain the app, or go through complicated integration procedures.

Alertful

Alertful is a simple, free reminder service. Just enter a task, holiday, meeting, or other event and your email address, and it will remind you on the appropriate day. You can tell it whether to just remind you once or on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

BrushLovers.com

BrushLovers.com is a new sister-site to Webdesigner Depot that offers a huge collection of both free and premium Photoshop brushes. The brushes included are all exclusive, so you won’t find them anywhere else!

MailerLite

MailerLite is a low-cost email newsletter program that uses a drag-and-drop content editor and doesn’t require HTML skills. Pricing starts at just over $.01/email sent, and goes down from there, depending on volume.

Wibba

Wibba is a new social sharing service for tech products, both online and off. You can share anything related to the tech industry: news, apps, videos, and more, and follow people to see what they’re sharing.

PicsEngine

PicsEngine is a new photo storage and sharing service. They offer a 30-day trial, but after that the charge is 5 Euros per month (or 50 Euros per year) for unlimited storage and up to 10GB of bandwidth per month. Photo galleries can be viewed with any browser, while the library service only works on Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

Observer

Observer is a new analytics app, currently still in private beta. It has a very elegant UI, and can give both a high-level view as well as a detailed view of what you need to know about your website traffic.

Weet for iPhone

Weet is a new, $.99 Twitter app for iPhone. It offers a clean interface, a number of built-in services (like Bit.ly, Posterous, Twitpic and TwitVid), and Read Later support. It also supports multiple accounts, and supports twitmore.

Awesome Fontstacks

Awesome Fontstacks is a great site for finding and creating failsafe font stacks that can be used with @font-face. Just pick a font to start, and the site will then show you compatible fonts.

Gitwrite

Gitwrite is “Blogging. For Nerds. Done right.” It’s basically a blogging platform built on Git. You sign up with Github and can then can update either via git or using their web interface.

Desks Near Me

Freelancers often work from home, which is great. Except when you’d like to get out of the house and work somewhere else for the day. That’s where Desks Near Me comes in. Enter your location and it will tell you of available places nearby where you can work for the day.

Owe Me Cash

Owe Me Cash is an online “collections” service that will send reminders via phone, text and email to those who owe you money.

RailsWizard

RailsWizard simplifies the creation of new Rails apps, by using a wizard to walk you through setting up the initial elements of your app. You can enter everything from the Database/ORM to the JavaScript framework and plugins to the templating engine and more.

foxGuide

foxGuide is a Firefox plugin that lets you add Photoshop-esque guides to webpages. It saves the guides you make for each page, too, so you don’t have to recreate them the next time you need them.

NULL Free Font

NULL is a new free font from Font Fabric. It’s a bold, sans-serif, display-style font, perfect for headlines.

Roke 1984

Roke 1984 is a new display-style font with a really unique look. It’s based on a geometric forms and mathematical symbols, and includes both numerals and accents.

Spatha Serif

Spatha Serif is a beautiful, slightly-rounded serif font with a vintage feel to it.

Unobtrusive Ajax Free Ebook

Here’s a free ebook from Jesse Skinner, and published by O’Reilly, for learning to use Ajax and JavaScript unobtrusively.

Verify

Verify is a new app for gathering feedback from users on mockups or screens. It gives clear, actionable results, and can be used for A/B testing among other types of tests. They offer a 30-day free trial, and then plans start at $9/month.

Cirkel Pro Font Family

Cirkel Pro is a funky new font family, that includes a number of unusual forms, all based on circles.

Skyhook Mono Font Family

The Skyhook Mono font family includes a variety of font weights and styles of this angular, monospace typeface. The regular weight is free to download, though other styles run about $20 each.

I Slabbed the Seriff Font

I Slabbed the Seriff is a new free font created with FontStruct. It’s a slab serif typeface, and includes numerals and accents.

Simple Booklet

Simple Booklet is an easy-to-use flipbook creator, that lets you include images, text, video, audio, and other content in your flipbooks, without any coding knowledge.

WordPress Snippets

WordPress Snippets simplifies theme creation and customization by providing pre-built code for a variety of functions and features. You can browse or search included code, or share your own code snippets.

The Square Grid

The Square Grid is a new CSS framework that works based on 35 equal-width columns. It also provides a 28px baseline-grid for smooth vertical rhythm.

Ai -> Canvas

Ai -> Canvas is a plug-in that lets Adobe Illustrator export vector and bitmap artwork directly to an HTML5 canvas element for rendering in a canvas-enabled browser. It provides drawing, animating, and coding options for creating interactive and well-designed canvas-based apps.

Markup

Markup is a bookmarklet that lets you draw on any webpage to share your ideas with others. You can draw with the Magic Marker or write with the Text tool, and then publish your ideas.

yfrog Widget Personalization

yfrog now lets you create a customized, personalized widget for sharing your yfrog photos in a blog or website sidebar.

Twilert

Twilert is a free app that lets you create automated email alerts for tweets. Just enter the search term, hashtag, or other criteria, and the time you want to receive your alerts, and Twilert will email you with any mentions.

Ontwik

Ontwik is a site that showcases lectures, screencasts, and conferences for web designers and developers. You can search or browse by tag (like creativity, Django, Github, JavaScript, jQuery, etc.). You can also submit videos of your own.

Yogile

Yogile is a new photosharing service that lets you create both private and public albums. Yogile stands out, though, by allowing friends and family to also submit images to your albums.

Capturely

Capturely makes it easy to create coming soon pages for your unlaunched websites aimed at getting visitors to submit their email address for updates.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

What do you think of these new tools for designers? If we missed something, please share it in the comments below!

Check out BrushLovers.com and find an awesome collection of free photoshop brushes

WDD Staff

WDD staff are proud to be able to bring you this daily blog about web design and development. If there's something you think we should be talking about let us know @DesignerDepot.