Design Tools News #34

I get the basics of CSS, but really getting to the fundamentals of how to calculate specificity, how inheritance works, and learning about little tricks is why you need to give this new weekly podcast a spin!

Una Kravets and Adam Argyle, Developer Advocates from Google, break down complex aspects of CSS into digestible episodes covering everything from accessibility to z-index.

Choosing colors is hard. Color Ninja is here to make that easier by helping you discover and create beautiful, matching colors. A very solid Mac app with an easy way to create palettes.

There’s a new color spec in CSS, and the possibilities of LCH and Lab sound really cool. We already have displays on all our modern devices that are capable of showing many more colors than what’s currently possible to show through RGB/HEX. Lea Verous describes what these new color formats are and why they’re exciting in her latest blog post. Be sure to check that out if you want to understand more about it when playing with this LCH color picker tool she created to visualize the possibilities.

A little web tool with a collection of customizable CSS section separators. Fiddle around, copy the code, and that’s all there is to it!

It’s my favorite tool for editing my photos on my iPad (and sometimes iPhone), and just last week they launched app-wide support for editing videos! It’s super powerful and cool to see Darkroom’s editing capabilities transition over to video. I personally don’t need it very often, but when I do I’m happy I can keep using the tool I’m already familiar with and love.

blokdots is a visual programming tool to “if this then that” your way through connecting hardware with software. The cool thing is they also offer a Figma plugin, so you can click a physical button, or turn a knob, to interact with your visual prototype.

This is a real nice overview of great type foundries, curated by Matthew Smith. It’s not really for discovering type though, more for filtering by those that offer webfonts, have variable fonts, or are on Adobe fonts for example.

I thoroughly enjoyed the SwiftUI course from Meng and his team a while back, and I still constantly see quality demos passing by on Twitter. They’re now giving out 50% discount for a year subscription!

There are courses for learning Swift, ProtoPie, Webflow, and many more cool tools, programming languages, and frameworks.

This is *not* a sponsored link — I don’ have those (yet?) — and I’m not affiliated in any way. Just thought you might find this interesting :)