Design Tools News #39

This is a great and very extensive iOS and Android components kit for Sketch and Figma. One of those that save you tremendous time whenever you start out with a new mobile project. It brings me joy to see how fast it is to mock up a design with Plaster in combination with Runner as well! Check it out, and use the promo code “Runner” for 40% off! 💰

A powerful visual UI builder for React. Build maintainable, production-ready presentational components at the speed of design. Plasmic is a tool to compose React UIs visually. With plugins for Sketch and Figma to import designs and get you started with rough designs, this tool aims to bring design and code closer together without compromising developer control. It’s in an early beta stage, but definitely worth keeping an eye out for!

Upgrade your writing! iA Writer now keeps your style in check. It’s carefully reviewing your text for redundancies, clichés and filler words as you type. It’s simple and powerful. It doesn’t tell you what is right. Instead it grays out superfluous words and strikes them through hypothetically, so you can see how your text will flow with them removed.

“What do I do when the colors we’re using in our design fail the checks?” and “How do I find colors that pass the checks but aren’t drastically different from our current color palette?”. Some common questions you could struggle with when you want to make your design look good, but for everyone. Stark is a plugin for Sketch, Adobe XD, and Figma, and with their latest release they provide alternative foreground and background swatches that are guaranteed to meet AA or AAA criteria of WCAG, and don’t deviate too far from your original. A must-have plugin for every designer!

Back in issue #36 I featured GradiHunt. And this is Color Hunt! It’s a free and open platform for color inspiration with thousands of trendy hand-picked color palettes.

Another one! Somehow I prefer seeing a palette of colors stacked horizontally. So you might find this alternative to Color Hunt interesting as well. Pretty simple and straight-forward, but effective for inspiration nonetheless. It allows quickly copying the HEX values of a palette for use in CSS as well.