Every designer probably has their own set of handy websites that they use for work. We’ve decided to show you some of the sites that we use and share our own selection of interesting resources for web designers, from stock sites to news channels and neural networks. It’ll be useful for newbies and experienced designers alike: the former will find it a little easier to navigate the ocean of existing services, while the latter will discover something new for themselves.
We haven’t included Pinterest, Behance and Shutterstock in the list – if you know anything about design, they’re probably on your radar already :)
Useful services
Websites with handy tools for web designers: sites with stock icons and fonts, palette and illustration generators, and so on.
Fonts
FontSpace
FontSpace is a website with over 100,000 free stock fonts of all shapes and sizes, created and uploaded to the platform by some 3,200 designers from all over the world. The platform allows you to enter a text and see how it looks in different fonts, find custom selections, leave comments and talk to other users. It also offers some cool features, such as a Lenny Face generator and a text analysis tool that displays all unicode symbols and shows invisible code points or misrepresented characters.
SnapFonts
A handy browser extension that lets you see how a website would look if you changed its fonts. You don’t need to sign up or download anything: just install the extension, go to any website, and choose one or several fonts out of 900 available ones. All fonts will automatically change according to the set size and style parameters, allowing you to see how the website would look with these changes. To upload a custom font, you’ll need to purchase a Pro subscription.
The extension is compatible with Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Brave.
Colours
Material Palette
A must-use website for any designer that allows you to generate a colour palette. The concept is pretty straight-forward: you choose any two colours, and the service will generate a palette of eight hues with codes.
Khroma
Khroma is another colour selection service, but this one is based on AI. To start, you need to select 50 hues that you like, and the neural network will use them to generate pairs that suit your taste. You can create endless combinations, and in each case the system will give you the codes, RGB values, CSS code, and WCAG accessibility rating.
Contrast.ratio
A tool that helps you check the contrast between two colours – very useful when choosing a website’s font hue. To use the service, enter the names or the codes of two colours: the website will display them together and calculate the contrast ratio. The higher the ratio, the better.
Icons, illustrations, patterns
Iconfinder
The largest stock icon website. Here you can find over 7 million icons, stickers, and 2D/3D illustrations available for download in PNG, SVG and AI. The site has a search tool that allows you to filter by style and licence type (free/paid).
Beautiful Dingbats’ Pattern Generator
A free tool for creating unique patterns and textures that can be used, for example, to design fonts. The service itself resembles a constructor, where you can combine different colours, patterns, styles, and objects. Templates can be exported in SVG, CSS, JPEG, PNG and CSS formats.
Telegram channels
Here are some of the channels we personally follow for market news, trends, life hacks and cases. Also, they sometimes announce events and training courses with a discount for followers.
UI/UX Designer - a channel run by Design Glory, a community of designers who share their experiences, post industry news and interesting content – from Jony Ive’s logo for the coronation of Charles III to Figma grid guides.
UX from Hell - examples of terrible UX design. Here you can find not only web design, but also real-world UX – for example, a picture of a bench built around a bed of cacti. It can give you a few chuckles and helps put yourself in the user’s shoes at the same time.
UX Notes - a news channel that selects the freshest and most interesting articles published by design gurus on various platforms, summarises them and provides a link to their full version.
Product Design Digest - a channel run by Yuri Vetrov, Head of Design at Mail.ru and lecturer at the British Higher School of Art & Design, where he posts extensive selections of exciting articles on UI/UX and product design. Among his most recent interesting posts is a list of reviews on the trends of 2023.
Neural networks
Recently, there’s been news about a new neural network, Galileo AI, that can generate interfaces from text queries. For instance, you can simply type “an onboarding screen for a dog walking app”, and the AI magic will do the rest. What’s interesting is that the results are fully editable in Figma. Galileo AI hasn’t been released yet, but you can sign up for early access.
Still, web designers have no reason to be concerned just yet, as neural networks are unlikely to replace them for another 5–10 years – and here’s why. In the meantime, artificial intelligence remains a useful design tool. For example, it can help draw backgrounds or illustrations as a replacement for stock images. So neural networks like DALL-E, Midjourney or GauGAN definitely belong in our selection of resources for web designers.