Great Online Design Tools and Resources
This is an ongoing collection of online stuff I find incredibly useful working as a UX Designer. It is meant as a tribute giving kudos where kudos are due and a place where fellow UX Designers can find inspiration.
The Noun Project
Apart from being a great user-generated icon database, this is my all time favorite place to seek inspiration when it comes to symbolism. How to visualize a complex concept with a simple, universally understandable symbol can be very tricky to think of from the top of one’s head. Try searching for abstract concepts like “agree”, “organization” or “access” and prepare to be surprised by how obvious the results seem.
Random Text Generator
“Lorem ipsum” goes a long way when creating mock-ups and prototypes with structural or aesthetic aim. But sometimes the strange latin phrases can distract the onlooker and draw away focus from what is really important to be considering at the moment. Randomtext generates any given amount of paragraphs containing any given amount of English words. The result is – of course – complete gibberish, but it can seem real at the first glance.
Multicolr
This tool is brilliant for creating moodboards. If you’re about to (re)design a brand identity or the likes it can be tough to think of words to enter in Google Image Search from the top of one’s head. TinEye Labs’ Multicolr takes your input of any color combination and provides a grid of concrete images from Flickr which contain that exact distribution of colors.
The Bézier Game
Vectors; friend to the professional graphic designer – fearsome to the amateur. In theory vectors are a beautiful and efficient way of drawing any given path from one point to another. In practice, however, their logic can be hard to understand and make use of. This browser-based game provides a great learning-by-doing approach to vector design.
Cover image icon credit: Joe Pictos from the Noun Project