The best new tools for designers are ones that make your life easier and your workflows faster. You’ll find some of those in this list this month for sure. From tools to help you capture and manage color palettes to AI-powered design analytics to simple animations, there’s something for almost every designer or developer.
Here’s what new for designers this month.
The Hero Generator
The Hero Generator is a fun tool that will help you create just the right hero header without having to write the code yourself. Upload your image, set some specs for spacing and color, add a button, and out comes the code for an example that you can build right on the screen. Make sure to play with the gradient overlay to get just the right color and orientation to ensure that your hero header looks great and includes a highly readable type.
Sorted Colors
Sorted Colors groups named CSS colors in a way that shows related colors together. It’s a nice way to check colors side by side when you are trying to make a final decision about a hue or color palette. You could also use it to create a monotone palette.
Attention Insight
Attention Insight is an AI-powered design analytics tool that allows you to compare multiple designs and to measure which object attracts the most attention. It uses a combination of heatmaps, percentage of attention metrics to help measure the overall clarity of your design. New features, such as a contrast checker, are also in the works. It works as a web app, plugin for popular software, or a Chrome extension.
Color Copy Paste
Color Copy Paste is an app that you can use to capture a color from practically anything and then paste it to Figma, Sketch, or a web browser. It’s a quick way to snag little bits of inspiration when you see them.
Runme
Runme, which is still in beta, allows you to build, deploy, and launch an application from any public Git-repo with one click. Enter a URL and a few commands and you are ready to go. This is an open-source tool and contributions are welcome.
Rough Notation
Rough Notation is a small JavaScript library to create and animate annotations on a web page. It uses RoughJS to create a hand-drawn look and feel. Elements can be annotated in a number of different styles. Animation duration and delay can be configured or turned off. Choose from options to underline, box, circle, highlight, cross off, strikethrough, group items, and more.
Trails
This is a simple, but useful goodie. Trails is a simple geometrical trail on an x and z axis that you can attach to Three.js objects. The simple animation is mesmerizing.
Pose Animator
Pose Animator takes a 2D vector illustration and animates its containing curves in real-time based on a recognition result from PostNet and FaceMesh. It borrows the idea of skeleton-based animation from computer graphics and applies it to vector characters. (It’s a fast way to cartoonize yourself.) You can build from a webcam video or single image in Chrome or Safari.
Neumorphism UI
Neumorphism UI is a user interface kit packed with components in the neumorphic style. It includes more than 200 components, 10 sections, and five example pages to build a website in this style.
3D Photography Using Context-Aware Layered Depth Inpainting
This project by a group of researchers proved that you can convert a single RGB-D image into a 3D photo, much like what you’d see from an iPhone. The included source code shows how to use a layered depth image as part of a learning-based model that creates a three-dimensional effect.
Blush
Blush is a fun, semi-custom illustration generator. It uses drawings from artists around the world with parts and color options that you can mix and match to get just the right illustration for your design project. Choose your specifications and download a PDF. It’s that easy.
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