Design Tools News #44

I’ve featured ColorBox around 2 years ago, but now it’s new and improved! With the updated web tool you have more ways to generate color sets that have good contrast with your background or text colors. It even suggests slightly adjusted colors for when you need to design for dark mode. Play around with it, or check out this Medium article to discover more.

Ever wanted to copy something, but it wasn’t actual text? With this little macOS tool you make a screenshot, but instead of capturing an image, it recognizes and copies the text *in* it to the clipboard. Set a hotkey for it, or trigger it from the menu bar, and you’re good to go. Well worth the couple bucks! It’s also available on SetApp, if that’s your thing.

Fran Pérez continues to rock! I featured this as a web tool in the last issue. But since then, the maker created a Figma plugin out of it to let you calculate the good line-height right inside your design tool.

I love the simplicity and utility of this tool. Lobe helps you train machine learning models in an easy to use way. Whether or not you’ll use this in the short term, I definitely recommend checking out their quick video tour, which shows how simple it gets to train a machine learning model with the app.

There were already all kinds of tools (and filters) that allowed you to tweak how a person looks, like adjusting their age, or emotion. And now these kinds of filters and image manipulations are integrated in the latest release of Photoshop. You can even tweak things like lighting, or head direction, and colorize black and white stills! And remember those scenes from a detective series where they zoom in and “enhance” a camera feed? Well, this is sort of possible now. Check it out!

A revolutionary redesign of New York City’s iconic subway map. Work&Co set out to modernize the transit map and include real-time sources to bring it to a level we’ve come to expect in this digital day and age.

This 10 minutes short documentary directed by Gary Hustwit (from Rams, Helvetica, and more…) captures a great story on the motivations, decisions made, and design tools used to make it happen. If you watch closely you’ll notice Sketch, Principle, Storybook, and VS Code being used to design, prototype, and build it.

Check out “The Map” on Vimeo, and play with the tool itself at map.mta.info

Airbnb surveyed over 250 illustrators around the world to find out their pain points with the business side of things. With Tyrus, they unpacked those challenges to create guides, templates, and tools so you can focus less on client management and more on creating your best work. With this kit, you can set out to nail the brief, champion originality, outwit deadlines, and demystify feedback.