As a designer you have a lots of tasks to do in an average day. Find an inspiration source, find a custom font, user testing, find icons, choose the right software, ask for feedback, share your work, deal with clients from hell (“I want the design to be purely typographic, but not only with letters in it“), and most of all – create great stuff. For every task you can use a tool (software or hardware), which helps you to save time, but in most case you have to pay for it.
But! If you already own a computer with internet access and maybe a sketchpad any other thing you need can be found online, and its FREE!
WhatTheFont
Seen a font in use and want to know what it is? Submit an image of it to WhatTheFont and the tool will find the closest match in its database. If there’s no close match, there’s a forum where you might be able to get some answers.
Dafont
A great website which allows you to browse fonts alphabetically, by themes, or by date. Most of the fonts are free to download.
The design inspiration
It is an online resource by designers for designers, and it gathers together logos, illustrations and patterns that act as a showcase of talent and as a source of inspiration.
Vector Magic
Convert bitmaps to vectors accurately and easily with this online and desktop tool. Its website isn’t the prettiest, but believe us, this is a tool that’s worth paying for.
Mondrian
Mondrian is an open-source free vector graphics web app like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape, available at mondrian.io. It was designed as a simple, fast-loading web-app to let people start making things immediately. It has SVG import/export and PNG export capability. It offers a variety of simple tools for creating and manipulating vector shapes.
Easel.ly
Easel.ly makes it easy to create visually sophisticated infographics through an online authoring tool. Think of it as Illustrator for infographics, and you’ve got a pretty good idea where it sits. Put simply, Easel.ly allows you to save time and quickly develop artwork to your vision by giving you a huge head start each time you want to convey data visually. There are other options available, but the template nature and customizability of Easel.ly makes it a winner!
Moqups
Moqups is a nifty HTML5 App used to create wireframes, mockups or UI concepts, prototypes depending on how you like to call them.
FiveSecondTest
Learn how visitors will interact with your design before launching. Find out what they think, what they remember, and where they make mistakes. Five Second Test is a tool designed to help you get feedback on first impressions of your design. Upload a screenshot of your design mockup, and set a series of questions to check whether your design passes the “five second test”; ie, meets the business goals and is memorable to users. Available as a free in-kind service, or on commercial terms, this website provides crucial external and unbiased feedback from visitors, without you having to arrange or conduct the testing sessions yourself. In other words, it’s ideal for trialling your design ideas.
ViewFlux
ViewFlux allows you to create clickable prototypes from your designs, easily get feedback and collaborate seamlessly with your clients. ViewFlux will help designers improove their feedback process in a manner that pleases the eye. Use it to get visual feedback and chat with clients in real time, build beautiful prototypes, share deliverables with ease and take advantage of versioning & repository for your designs. You can link/click hotspots and take the clients through workflows (it’s like using a real app) which helps a lot in verification of the thought process/idea itself.
Adobe kuler
Adobe kuler is a web-based application by Adobe that helps you create and share color themes.
Iconfinder
Iconfinder provides beautiful icons to millions of designers, developers and other creative professionals. Iconfinder now hosts the worlds largest collection of premium icons, with over 340.000 icons in stock. The Iconfinder Marketplace lets contributing illustrators earn royalties by drawing, uploading and selling their original artwork.
IcoMoon
With over 4600 free and open source icons available in IcoMoon’s library, and by allowing you to generate crisp icon fonts locally and offline, this service is far ahead of any similar one.
Lipsum
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.
WeTransfer
WeTransfer enables you to send up to 2GB of files with no signup. Files are getting ever bigger, so whether you’re sending artwork to print, or rushes to your client for first approval, file transfer services are an essential in every creative’s toolbox. WeTransfer enables you to send up to 2GB of files with no signup or registration required.
