18 tools & websites to help product designers work smarter
Resources and tools to streamline your workflow and enhance creativity.
Hey friends 👋, the weather is getting warmer, and I couldn’t be happier. For those of you who felt burn out lately — I hope you take some quality time to decompress and nurture yourself.
In this piece, I'd like to share with you a list of tools and resources that helped me work smarter as a product designer. The content may get clipped in your inbox because of its length, but you can read it on the Class Zero website here.
In these modern times, design has become one of the significant parts of product creation. With the booming of the design industry and continuous improvement processes, product designers have to perform so many roles encompassing the multiple aspects of product design. A great deal of assistance is now needed to be successful in the field, whether you are a student or an expert. No single software can help you in all of those responsibilities. This post shares more details about a list of some powerful and innovative tools and resources that will make things more effective and smoother for you.
Hello Bonsai makes it as easy as pie to run your creative freelance business. It’s an efficient management app that simplifies your freelancing tasks. It comes with a bulletproof contract, e-signing, proposals, and invoice features to save your time and helps you be focused on creating fun freelance work. It’s an indispensable tool for managing multiple freelance projects.
You can create portfolios and forms using this all-in-one app. It handles your headache of managing clients and leads. It helps you track your project time and get paid faster in different ways.
It’s available on Android, iOS, and Mac OS X platforms. The basic plan has all the above-mentioned features and costs USD 19 per month. A premium plan with USD 29 per month provides additional features of white labeling and subcontracting.
Bestfolios is an online collection of students’ websites, resumes, case studies, and more. You can browse through this website to get inspired by the emerging designers’ portfolios and learn from upcoming design talent from the newly added ‘Talent List’.
I learn a lot from several books and articles available here on UX, product design, and career development. You will also find some of the unconventional paths and stories for how other designers get their foot in the door at top-notch tech companies with high barriers to entry.
If you are looking for a job board for an internship opportunity in the design space, just go to interns.design for its quality recommendations. Here you will find an up-to-date list of opportunities that range from the contract, internship, and new-grad roles.
You can also submit your portfolio to its Design Recruiting Database so that the companies looking for your skills can connect with you. The site with its amazingly simple interface boasts having connected more than 35,000 students to various companies.
Site Inspire is a massive crowdsourcing repository of cool websites showcasing exciting web and interactive design. The database can be searched by a specific type, style, or subject.
The membership is free of cost. You can become a member and submit your own website to its database.
Whimsical - 'the visual workspace’ - is my indispensable tool to collaborate with my teams. It offers a variety of awesome visual assets available for you to use for different purposes. It allows you to create sticky notes, diagrams, and flowcharts, etc. I love being able to make mind maps and flows and switch over to my wireframes within the same platform easily.
Whimsical relieves me of the formatting work, so I can focus on my actual work. I will not bore you with all the details – just try it for yourself. It offers free limited membership and full membership with a subscription fee of $12 USD/month or $120 USD/year.
Coolors is an incredible color scheme generator. Whether you’re just looking for inspiration, fun palettes to mess with or extract a palette to make beautiful collages with your photo, Coolors is the place to go. If you’ve got some favorite colors, just save them into your color library to have them always at your fingertips in the color picker. You can swiftly organize your palettes in projects or collections to find them with ease.
Colors is also available as an iOS app, Chrome extension, and Adobe extension. So take your desired route to Coolors and enjoy a number of exciting features to boost your design.
Mesh Gradients is a collection of 100 free gradients to choose from. I love using this enlightening scroll that’s packed with soft and vibrant tones. You can use them to add a dash of color to some UI components, landing page, or anything else you’re working on.
These beautifully designed templates will accelerate your workflow by saving your time. They will help you to streamline your workflow and make your life a bit easier while working on your next Venn diagram or user journey map. A great variety of templates like Instagram templates, wireframe kits, flowchart makers, and Mobile UI kits are available — all free from Figma Templates.
Mobbin, Saasframe & UX Archive are great sites for inspiration when you are stuck on a part of your website or mobile app design. You can look for stellar design patterns and inspirations from these resources that highlight different user experience flows from popular tech companies. Suppose you are curious about how other companies have laid out their “Forgot Password” experience — with these sites, you can quickly browse examples to see how they’ve done it.
Mobbin is a hand-picked collection of the latest mobile design patterns from some great apps.
SaaSFrame offers hundreds of marketing pages, product interfaces and email flows with unlimited access for a one-time fee of $89 USD.
UX Archive is the leading destination that provides you an opportunity to explore what the top mobile app developers have done to define what works and what doesn’t. It helps you find the patterns that you should integrate into your app.
CSS Peeper is a Chrome extension that allows you to inspect fonts, colors, svg assets, and images you encountered on the web. This is a CSS viewer tailored for designers’ needs. Having experienced some other similar tool, I would say CSS Peeper takes the cake.
It allows you to inspect the whole color palette of a website. You can view all of them listed in a visual style, and instantly find the one you actually need.
If you’ve ever tried to extract some assets nested deep in a code you’re going to like this. You can download single assets or get them all packed in a .zip file.
These two sites are my go-to place for choosing the perfect font combination for my next design project. You can not only see a variety of hand-curated collections of graphic websites with elegant font combinations but also find font recommendations for your specific needs.
Fonts In Use is a public archive of typography indexed by typeface, format, industry, and period supported by examples. I use it for type selection and pairing and discover new ways to choose and use fonts.
The special feature of Typewolf is that while other typography sites tend to be written from a type designer’s perspective, it has been designed from a product designer’s perspective.
This web-based tool is also available as an application for desktop, iOS and Android. With Lottie Files, you can find the best library of animations designed for Lottie. This tool helps you to test and perfect Lottie animations.
You can simply edit and ship your animation in just a few clicks, making the designer-developer handoff process smoother like never before. Beyond the animated svg, you can also discover thousands of free animations for your products. It also enables you to convert your animation to another format.
Useberry is an online user-testing tool that helps designers, agile PMs, marketers, and business owners to get rich user feedback right from the prototype before the development stage. It enables you to test your innovative ideas and generate user insights overnight.
It has a monthly fee of $33 USD for the basic plan.
Loom is an innovative tool that is changing the future of bringing video messaging to work. It allows you to record video messages of your screen, cam, or both. While Loom in your hands, there’s hardly anything to schedule, and no need to type a wall of text. I love using Loom to send screen-sharing videos of my presentation to my teammates in lightning speed and communicate my ideas effectively.
It’s available for desktop and iOS. It offers a free Starter plan, and a full-feature plan for $8 USD per month billed annually.
Material is a design system that helps teams build high-quality digital experiences for Android, iOS, Flutter, and the web. It has a wealth of helpful tools, resources, tips, guides, and more. By using the Type-scale tool and the Color Palette Generator, you will find it magically easier to generate an appealing color palette that is already adjusted for accessibility.
Material Design goes a step further and enables designers to create intentional designs with meaning, hierarchy, and focus in their end result.
This all-in-one collaboration tool is for your team to jam on ideas efficiently. Coda can help you to link Teams (the groups of people building features), Milestones (the major gates to full launch), and Features (the individual work items) together. So you can quickly see how features are evolving overtime against each milestone, both at a team and a milestone level. It helps you organize your thoughts, find inspiration, and capture ideas before they fade away during the chaotic design process. You will get the power of Excel with the simplicity of Notion.
The next time you want to collaborate with your teammates effectively with one source of truth, try it in Coda first. It has changed the way our meetings work.
This AI-powered assistant lets you generate rich notes syncing audio, text, and images, for meetings, lectures, or interviews. It’s the right choice if you’re looking for a voice-to-text transcription app.
Its smooth interface lets you focus on conversation, rather than taking notes. It’s a handy way for capturing and finding important spoken information, freeing teams to be more productive and engaged. It can also be integrated with Zoom. You can also speed up the playback or skip silence to skim through a long recording.
It’s an online background removal tool with some stunning results. Its features enable you to change the background and make your image impressive. Whether you need to make an awesome greeting card for your bestie, or just remove a cluttered background from your favorite selfie, remove.bg makes it happen. Some users have found it to be a matchless advancement in the field of background removal. With a few clicks, you can apply effects and share your creation in multiple ways. It’s also available as a desktop and Android app.
So that’s the list of some of the efficient assistants to help you as a designer. Although I recommend you try some of them, you might not need to make them all a part of your routine. Depending on your specific habits and work environment, you may need some of them more than the others to perfectly fit in your workflow.
Would love to learn what tools bring you great value, feel free to share that in the comments section below.
That's it for this week! If you enjoyed this post, I'd be very appreciative if you shared it to a friend who might find it useful! (Or send them the links, and tell them where you got them :)
As always, I hope you are safe, sane, and healthy.
I'll see you next week,
Warmly,
ClassZero in Product