What are some Designer Tools?
Looking for designer tools?
Well, here you go. I have collected a few of the tools I use to design at Fonseka Innovations to show off. To section it out, I list out my inspiration sites, typeface sites, images sites, illustrations sites and icon sites I use on my daily work grind. Let’s start!
Inspiration
Dribbble
The “world’s leading community for creatives to share, grow and get hired.” Dribbble is an awesome place to discover awesome designs by designers around the world. Illustrations, UX/UI Design, Print and more. There is an abundance of great inspiration to find!
The Dribbble blog is also a great place to learn about design and further improve your skills and understanding. For those freelance designers, business post job listings and can search for designers they wish to hire.
Behance
There is so much to look at on Behance. You can search through projects from designers and creators from all around the globe. Search via keywords, Adobe software, creative fields and more.
There are some amazing designs out there to take inspiration from and this is a designer tool to bookmark.
Awwwards
For web design, Awwwards is a great place to find the newest and best web design trends. Some of the websites that are featured on Awwwards are extremely innovative and can help inspire different parts of your own website.
Fonts & Typefaces
Google Fonts
When talking about designer tools, typefaces and fonts are a must-have.
With 999 font families, there is one place that has the best and most common fonts and that's Google Fonts. It’s free, intuitive and has a great UI too. Users can download or embed the fonts they desire. Super easy, super useful.
Also, Google Fonts has provided a cool feature where it finds the most popular font pairings. So you can figure out your typeface hierarchy easier.
Images
Unsplash
Beautiful, royalty-free photos that you can use in all types of design. Unsplash has thousands of high-quality images that photographers upload.
With “Over 1 million free high-resolution images brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers.” - Unsplash
This site might just have the image you are looking for.
Pexels
A similar site, Pexels has more options to choose from. Providing free stock images, Pexels is one of the top sites to get free images for millions of creators.
You can easily find an image that you desire due to the millions of photos to choose from.
Illustrations & Vectors
Vecteezy
Similar to Unsplash and Pexels, Vecteezy has a huge library of vectors and illustrations that are free to use. With an excess of patterns, images, backgrounds and more, you won’t have any trouble finding the vector you fancy.
A perfect website to add to your designer tools.
Isometric Love
If you are looking for 3D vectors, Isometric Love is top-tier. Well-done vectors that are animated to give your application or website that extra bit of life. These vectors are super clean, I would give it a look.
Icons
FontAwesome
FontAwesome is a commonly used icon library for web developers and designers. You can download free icons from a large archive. Unfortunately, to access various styles of icons, you will a require subscription, but the base, free icons are honestly enough.
Material.io
Google’s Material icons are also a great alternative to use. All their icons are free to use and download. All Material Icons styles are available, unlike FontAwesome. So if you are looking for a stroke-style icon, you can find it here.
Any More Designer Tools?
I could list hundreds of designer tools that are really useful, but here are the top tools I use when designing at Fonseka Innovations. If you have any other tools that you would recommend, just share it in the comments below!