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Musings • Blog

Minim's Most Helpful and Inexpensive Design Tools

VISIT SITE
BradLey
Chad
Tools
Aug 25, 2021

I've come across a lot of really great tools and websites that can making doing big tasks a lot faster. What if you need to remove the background of a VIDEO? Well that's really hard, but there's a great site that will. Most of these are free. Some things like Affinity products are $50 one time instead of paying Adobe $20/mo for every.

All of these have saved me a ton of time and money so that I can get great products and content to you faster. I hope these get you as excited as they do for me.

Web Design

Webflow

The best way to build on the web. Period. I use it for every web project and it absolutely is coding, but with a visual interface very akin to Illustrator or Affinity Designer. It's capable of anything and doesn't get slow when there's a lot of data. The client editor give the designer the control over what they can/can't edit and makes blogging and creating content as easy as possible. I can build a site faster than I can make a mockup of it because of Webflow.

CodeCrumbs

Every so often there's something you wish your website could do, but you need custom Javascript. This has many helpful little tricks to save you time!

Lottie Files

A great place for free customizable Lottie files to use on your websites or just make a GIF with.

Lottie Flow

Next level, free lottie animations made more with websites in mind. From the legendary Finsweet crew.

Images & Video Editing

Darkroom App

I like this better than Adobe Lightroom, because it has the same tools and capabilities but condensed into a much easier layout. You can edit and export multiple images at once and save your favorite edits for easy use when you shoot in a similar situation. More often than not, I can give people the images I just shot in the same night. This is how and it saves me hours of time and all my images are edited with it. I like the mobile version, but they have iPad and Desktop versions that rock too. this one is a little more expensive, but ultimately a money saver.

Duotone

A free way to give you images that two tone color look. You can search Unsplash images too.

TinyPNG

Fantastic, free, image compressor. This sounds simple, but I use this for every image I upload to any website. It reduces the load times of pages by a lot when you have lots of content. On the free version it can do up to 20 images at a time. If you have larger batches it's only $25 a year.

Unsplash

Excellent, beautiful, free images, you can use anywhere. You can download different qualities and resolutions too.

Unscreen

Remove background from videos

Previewd

A free app mockup generator

Free Mockup

Great templates for shirt, phone, tablet, desktop mock ups and more. They look really slick and are easy to add your work too.

Redraw

Make stylistic vectors of any image. it's kinda cool and free.

General Design

FontShare

Hands-down my favorite place to get fonts! They're free and its just works great! Beautiful fonts too.

Affinity Designer

A much better alternative to Adobe Illustrator. They make quite a few things easier to see, find and understand. You don't realize how slow something can be in Adobe until you try Afiinty Designer. I particularly love the export, art boards, layers and effects. This saves me lots of time on graphics.

It's $55 one time and every year they have a half- off sale too. buy it in the App Store or from their site.

Affinity Publisher

Takes everything you don't like about Adobe InDesign and saves you more time. It's like they were frustrated with Adobe and decided to do something about it.

It's $55 one time and every year they have a half- off sale too. buy it in the App Store or from their site.

Affinity Photo

They took Adobe Lightroom and made it easier to use without sacrificing the power. With no monthly payments.

It's $55 one time and every year they have a half- off sale too. buy it in the App Store or from their site.

QR Code Monkey

Free SVG or PNG QR codes that never expire on you. I like to download the SVG, open it in Affinity and style it the way I want to.

The QR Code Generator

Free SVG or PNG QR codes that never expire on you. I like to download the SVG, open it in Affinity and style it the way I want to.

Vectary

Really great 3D Design program for people who don't know a thing about 3D modeling. Wou can use this in Webflow to create some studding scroll interactions.

Angular Icons

Free, simple and slick SVG Icons you can download and edit in Affinity Designer or water.

Ikonate

Free in-browser customizable SVG icons. Similar to Angular Icons. I use a combination of the two for when one doesn't have what I need.

FlatIcon

Not always the coolest icons, but they have everything, so sometimes its good for using pieces.

Blob Maker

Make SVG shapes for free.

Shape Factory

A sweet logo maker, color matcher, gradient maker, duotone image filter and vector illustration maker. Free.

Freepik

A solid place for downloading free vectors art and illustrations for you to use pieces of in your project.

Atlist Map Maker

I've been looking for a good map designer for years and this one takes the cake. You can add custom points and change the maps styles extremely easily and it looks perty.