10 fresh design tools to help you create luscious visuals

I m fond of everything new and shiny, just look at my side projects folder on my MacBook ?. Over the years, I realized that I was very impatient working on these projects and wanted to see the results as soon as possible. Therefore, I often cannot decide how much it costs to work on a project before showing someone the MVP.

Fortunately, many years ago I found a platform called ProductHunt, which has now become a household name. In the past, I mainly used it to track early technology or business optimization projects rather than design related projects. This month I decided to broaden my horizons and put together some nifty tools that can help us with our next project. ?

Blobs – create beautiful blob-shaped shapes

I often create promotional materials for social media posts, and these fun elements can create a sense of depth through photography. Blobs also comes in handy for natural and organic websites, especially when forms change across state transitions.

It is easy to manipulate complex shapes with this tool, whether you want to add a fill with color, gradient, or maybe a pattern. If you re happy with the result, you can save the generated blob to SVG for use in Figma or Sketch. If you are a mobile developer, you might be interested in the Flutter option! This is a really nice feature that even works offline. Who will join the blob party after COVID? ✈️

Presentation Templates by Pitch

Quotes, agency reports, and a host of other documents these days take the form of presentations, so it s important to quickly find the creative spark to share your thoughts with the world through beautiful slides.

Pitch Is a team oriented presentation app (I think it looks like google slides). It makes collaboration more interactive and fun. The company s latest release comes with over 50 templates for a variety of purposes, so if you want to effectively create stunning presentations, you ll find where to start. Please throw away those ugly corporate slides once and for all! ?‍♂️

Float – bring your art to life

Don t be confused by the headline, Float not just for artists. This great web app opens up a whole new dimension to presenting your designs by bringing exported layers to life.

It s also great if you re thinking of some NFT art to create, or for an “A” game on social media. This will set you apart from the competition. It works best in Chrome and Safari, and is currently discounted for $ 18.

Illustration Libraries by Blush

Probably, Pablo Is one of the funniest characters in modern design and is also the founder of an illustration project called Blush. You ask what is Blush? Well, this is a library of hand-drawn illustrations that you can customize in many different ways for your website, marketing campaigns, presentation visuals, avatars, or any project that requires doodles! The library contains various accessories, outfits, emotions, body language, and more! ✨

Also with the plugin, you can use Blush in Figma and Sketch to keep iterating without losing context until you find the right doodle.

Haikei – Unique SVG Resources in Seconds

Blobs are great, but have you ever wanted to generate waves, blurred gradients, scatter in circles, low poly mesh, and many other deformed SVG shapes at the same time? You ve just found the right tool for creating banner backgrounds, product demos, and blog images.

Haikei Is, in fact, a set of generators in which changing visual parameters such as interpolation, direction, balance and complexity allows you to create design resources that can be used as SVG or PNG files. You can start using the application for free, but soon the Pro version will add several new generators and support for code snippets for JSX (React!). It s great to see this product evolve!

MagicPattern Toolbar

Last year MagicPattern appeared as a simple generator of geometric patterns, but since then the product has evolved into something more. The core of the toolbox is still pattern-related, but now you can also create mesh gradients, doodle backgrounds, and grainy surfaces!

I love the patterning tool in Adobe Illustrator, but it can be tedious to move the patterns around to get the look you want. MagicPattern solves this problem with ease. It simplifies the initial setup of some of the brand colors so that the finished result can be easily adapted to suit the needs of the company.

Studyum 3D icons

If you read mine previous articlesthen you might have stumbled upon a post on design trends for 2021, and to be honest, I am very disappointed with the number of websites that have started using illustrations created in Cinema 4D. However, most of the year is still ahead, so there is still a chance to make a unique design, and with the help of Studyum it is possible. What is Studyum? This is a dedicated set of customizable hand-crafted icons for online education. While all of the original renders were done in Cinema 4D, you don t need to be a guru to use them in Figma as well!

Resources are available in ultra-high resolution (3500x3500px), as well as renderings with black and white clay. I hope the development team will continue to expand icons in other areas as well.

THINGS by morflax

Mockups never get bored, especially when made in 3D, and instead of boring human hands, the device holds, for example, emoji, it s so cute! ✌️ THINGS can create real and clay devices with backgrounds and controlled lighting to perfectly match the atmosphere of your website. The exported assets (JPG and PNG) are super-high quality and frankly look a lot more attractive than Smart Objects in Photoshop.

Removal.AI

Oh my god, I ll probably never forget that one of my first tasks at design school was to remove the background from several hundred products in order to learn the tools properly. It was a total nightmare. Today s students are more fortunate: they have not only smarter Photoshop, but also Removal.aiwhich, using artificial intelligence, massively removes the background from anything.

It definitely speeds up your workflow so you can focus more on the design work itself, and if you re a programmer, you can integrate it as an API to handle over 1000 images per day. I could complete my assignment in less than an hour, eh … The good old days.

Sensa emoji

Have you ever wondered why we are limited to certain emojis installed on our devices? The reality is that introducing something new is a rather difficult process, so in this sense we are in the hands of large corporations who decide for us when new dinosaurs finally appear ?

Although Sensa emoji cannot create dynomoji, it truly supports open source movement and offers over 300 high quality, vector and developer-friendly emojis that can be customized in both Sketch and Figma. Yes, you read that correctly, you can customize them for your own brand. Many thanks to Sensa s multidisciplinary design team for making this possible! ?

That s all, I hope you can implement at least one of the programs into your workflow or future projects. Thanks for reading.