Some fun, free tools for designers, curated by Danil Vladimirov.

everywhere.tools
Collection of open-source tools for designers & creatives
Some fun, free tools for designers, curated by Danil Vladimirov.
Collection of open-source tools for designers & creatives
Related to my earlier post today about Arc’s novelty tax, here’s an essay by DOC, a tribute to consistency.
Leveraging known, established UX patterns and sticking to them prevent users from having to learn net-new interactions and build net-new mental models every time they engage with a new product.
But, as Josh Miller wrote in the aforementioned post, “New interfaces start from familiar ones.” DOC’s essay uses jazz as a metaphor:
Consistency is about making room for differentiation. Think about a jazz session: the band starts from a known scale, rhythm. One musician breaks through, improvising on top of that pattern for a few minutes before joining the band again. The band, the audience, everyone knows what is happening, when it starts and when it ends, because the foundation of it all is a consistent melody.
On compounding patterns and the art of divergence.
A lot of chatter in the larger design and development community has been either “AI is the coolest” or “AI is shite and I want nothing to do with it.”
Tobias van Schneider puts it plainly:
AI is here to stay.
Resistance is futile. Doesn't matter how we feel about it. AI has arrived, and it's going to transform every industry, period. The ship has sailed, and we're all along for the ride whether we like it or not. Not using AI in the future is the equivalent to not using the internet. You can get away with it, but it's not going to be easy for you.
He goes on to argue that craftspeople have been affected the most, not only by AI, but by the proliferation of stock and templates:
The warning signs have been flashing for years. We've witnessed the democratization of design through templates, stock assets, and simplified tools that turned specialized knowledge into commodity. Remember when knowing Photoshop guaranteed employment? Those days disappeared years ago. AI isn't starting this fire, it's just pouring gasoline on it. The technical specialist without artistic vision is rapidly becoming as relevant as a telephone operator in the age of smartphones. It's simply not needed anymore.
But he’s not all doom and gloom.
If the client could theoretically do everything themselves with AI, then why hire a designer?
Excellent question. I believe there are three reasons to continue hiring a designer:
1. Clients lag behind. It'll takes a few years before they fully catch up and stop hiring creatives for certain tasks, at which point creatives have caught up on what makes them worthy (beyond just production output).
2. Clients famously don't know what they want. That's the primary reason to hire a designer with a vision. Even with AI at their fingertips, they wouldn't know what instructions to give because they don't understand the process.
3. Smart clients focus on their strengths and outsource the rest. If I run a company I could handle my own bookkeeping, but I'll hire someone. Same with creative services. AI won't change that fundamental business logic. Just because I can, doesn't mean I should.
And finally, he echoes the same sentiment that I’ve been saying (not that I’m the originator of this thought—just great minds think alike!):
What differentiates great designers then?
The Final Filter: taste & good judgment
Everyone in design circles loves to pontificate about taste, but it's always the people with portfolios that look like a Vegas casino who have the most to say. Taste is the emperor's new clothes of the creative industry, claimed by all, possessed by few, recognized only by those who already have it.
In other words, as designers, we need to lean into our curation skills.
Let's not bullshit ourselves. Our creative industry is in the midst of a massive transformation. MidJourney, ChatGPT, Claude and dozens of other tools have already fundamentally altered how ideation, design and creation happens.
Travis Bumgarner:
The people of Mexico, without asking anybody, chose bright colors to paint their houses. I fell in love. Every time I pass by a colorful house, I feel inspired.
It’s color palettes based on random houses in Mexico.
Color palettes inspired by Mexican architecture
How AI can bridge the communication gap by shifting from automation to collaboration
A reporter stumbled upon a treasure trove of Department of Defense slides from the 1970s and 1980s depicting data from missile systems, Soviet capabilities and America’s nuclear arsenal.
I had a wonderful job, until I didn’t. This is about what happened—and what is still happening.
A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.
The fall of Sonos isn’t as simple as a botched app redesign. Instead, it is the cumulative result of poor strategy, hubris, and forgetting the company’s core value proposition. To recap, Sonos rolled out a new mobile app in May 2024, promising “an unprecedented streaming experience.” Instead, it was a severely handicapped app, missing core features and broke users’ systems. By January 2025, that failed launch wiped nearly $500 million from the company’s market value and cost CEO Patrick Spence his job.
What happened? Why did Sonos go backwards on accessibility? Why did the company remove features like sleep timers and queue management? Immediately after the rollout, the backlash began to snowball into a major crisis.
As a designer and longtime Sonos customer who was also affected by the terrible new app, a little piece of me died inside each time I read the word “redesign.” It was hard not to take it personally, knowing that my profession could have anything to do with how things turned out. Was it really Design’s fault?
In the future, everyone can cook.
Prototyping a concept for simpler, physical climate controls
Musings, ramblings, and principles that I’ve shared with my team and randomly on Twitter. Reminding yourself of the principles that ground you is simply a good practice. Here are mine.
And how designers can adapt.
I was sitting on a barstool next to my wife in a packed restaurant in Little Italy. We were the lone Kansas City Chiefs supporters in a nest full of hipster Philadelphia Eagles fans. After Jon Batiste finished his fantastic rendition of the national anthem, and the teams took the field for kickoff, I noticed something. The scorebug—the broadcast industry’s term for the lower-third or chyron graphic at the bottom of the screen—was different, and in a good way.
I posted about it seven minutes into the first quarter, saying I appreciated “the minimalistic lower-thirds for this Super Bowl broadcast.” It was indeed refreshing, a break from the over-the-top 3D-animated sparkling. I thought the graphics were clear and utilitarian while being exquisitely-designed. They weren’t distracting from the action. As with any good interface design, this new scorebug kept the focus on the players and the game, not itself. I also thought they were a long-delayed response to Apple’s Friday Night Baseball scorebug.
A digital home for all our brand guidelines, that serves as both a super-functional resource and a celebration of our Design team’s creativity, craft, and ...
How key interface decisions are shaping the next era of human-computer interaction
Sketching isn’t about perfection—it’s about thinking through ideas and making them easier to share.
There's lots of debate within UI design circles about the explosion of chat interfaces driven by large-scale AI models. While there's certainly pros and cons to...
Footer is a curated gallery of the top website footer inspiration on earth. Find the footers you need and sort by type and style.
For Neville Brody, being made an OBE in the New Year Honours list was “a complete surprise.” Not because of his counter-cultural backstory, but because he thought recipients had to be nominated.
Explore our hand-picked collection of out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.
Logos are no longer the sole defining element of a brand, as dynamic branding, AI personalization, and social media dominance challenge their relevance. While still valuable as anchors of identity, logos must evolve into adaptable, integrated tools to thrive in today’s fluid and experience-driven branding landscape.
How designers can use storytelling to gain buy-in, inspire action, and grow influence.
Exploring unseen concepts of design and opportunities of design-driven transformation and change
The growing wave of AI is currently changing and shaping the products and experiences we interact with daily. From predictive text…