Design Tools News #30

The new plugin from Vectary allows you to create a mockup in 3D out of your Sketch artboard. Use one of the 3D models from their provided asset library, or use your own 3D file. The possibilities are endless! I think a sense of depth becomes more and more important in digital design and I’d be curious to see if this tool is affecting how much we’re gonna see 3D being used in our field.

Now that Sketch has Smart Layout, this new plugin to preview and sync copy translations for multiple languages comes in especially handy. Crowdin is a cloud-based tool to manage your content localization. When you’re designing for products across multiple markets, it’s usually a hassle dealing with multiple languages. Well, it should get much faster to iterate and get a consistent design that works well across many locales with Crowdin!

This is a really neat web tool to create smooth shadows. Because slapping a single shadow on an element just doesn’t look that great. Play around with it to create layered shadows and tweak all their properties for getting the appearance you’re after. There’s also a Figma plugin now!

Unsplash is powered by imgix, and that enables a lot of powerful tweaks to your website’s images through query parameters that you might not have been aware of. Think of adjusting the crop, tweak contrast or saturation, apply blend modes or blur, and much more. Check out what it can do trough imgix’ API and take some inspiration from Adam Wathan!

An insight into what designer’s tool boxes look like these days. Sketch is still most used, but Figma is catching up fast. Check it out for yourself!

Not long after Sketch launched their Smart Layout, Figma now released their version of resizing boxes called Auto Layout. You can use it to resize buttons with their text, rearrange items in a list when moving them around, and also use nested elements that respond to their content.