Design Tools News #35

The Penbook app got a major update. It is a great app that combines the best of scribbling in a notepad, with smart features. It includes over 100 different cool templates. Think of a storyboard, wireframe, isometric, perspective, and even day/week/month/year calendars. The smartness in the calendars shows by highlighting the current time or day on your paper! It works with PencilKit, and that gets you the same tools as editing a PDF for example.

I hope it would get even more powerful features like a quick way to draw straight lines. This works great in Procreate, where you. In Penbook you need to draw across the onscreen ruler. Which works, but is just a little slower.

Framer is back once again with the most beautiful landing page of the internet. They introduced Framer Web last week. Their take on a modern, browser-based design and prototyping tool with live collaboration.

The onboarding tutorial is a real treat. I loved being guided through making a simple prototype with an interactive video tutorial. There is no code required, but you still can add an extra layer of interactivity with React. Best of all, it’s now free to use for a couple of projects.

I can truly relate to the bold statement on their homepage:

“Pictures are great for postcards. But buttons are meant to be clicked” And to me that is completely in line with the direction design tools to go.

This is a great app for finding those hard-to-find glyphs. Just type a keyword, and it filters all the glyphs in your collection. It has fine-grained control over what glyphs you want to include. So if maths symbols, emoji, currency symbols are important for you, you can turn those on in settings. For each glyph, you can quickly copy it, but also find their corresponding name, description, and codes for development.

It has a somewhat hidden feature that works just like Quick Look in the macOS Finder. Hitting Space with a glyph selected opens a full preview of the glyph with all its typographic metrics like ascender, descender or x‑heights.

Look, it’s well worth the couple bucks ☞ © × π ‰ ℃  « ⌘ ★ ♀ ♣ ✓ ⌫

Pablo Stanley and team are at it again! Blush is like Unsplash, but then for generating illustrations. You can filter by collection and artist, and then define all sorts of aspects from color palette, down to the atoms of the illustration. Create, mix, and customize illustrations made by artists around the world.

This is a well-designed and extensive set of icons available directly in CSS or SCSS, but also exports as SVG, Figma, and Adobe XD files. It has a nice web app that allows you to search and filter, set colors, and copy the values right-away.

It’s a bit of a missed opportunity that they did not bother to give this icon set a name! It would’ve been so much easier to refer to it and make it stand out from other sets. This thing deserves a proper brand.

With Geene you can pick a color and it generates a range of shades that can be used for interfaces or visualisations. You can choose a couple of different previews, and play with the ranges themselves. It then exports to CSS (and all the preprocessors), Sketch, and more.

This looks like a great no frills video editing tool. Sometimes you just want to make a few simple edits, and add a couple of texts or shape overlays. With Veed you just pop up the editor in your browser and start cutting up your video.