Uses: The Apps, Sites and Design Games I Recommend

Lists of "essential design tools" are everywhere. This one is shorter and more personal: the tools that actually stay installed, and the sites I keep sending people to.

This is that list. It leans toward free, open-source and one-time-purchase tools, because paid services keep shifting and I'd rather know I can still open my files in five years. Everything here is something I use or recommend, with one line on why.

Apps I use

Obsidian. A note-taking app built on plain Markdown files, with a community of plugins that lets you shape it into your own knowledge base.

LibreOffice. A free, open-source office suite (Writer, Calc, Impress, plus Draw, Base and Math). The interface isn't pretty, but I never have to wonder which account a document lives in.

Zotero. A free, open-source reference manager that collects your sources and generates citations and bibliographies (APA included). It makes academic reading noticeably less tedious.

Comet. Perplexity's browser. The agent mode needs very specific instructions, but scheduled tasks, Chrome extension support and cited answers made it my main browser.

Msty. A desktop app for chatting with AI models, including ones running locally on your own machine.

Bartender. Tidies the Mac menu bar by hiding the icons you don't need to see all the time.

Things 3. A clean, calm to-do app for Apple devices, sold as a one-time purchase.

MoneyWiz. A personal finance app for tracking accounts and budgets.

Design tools

Penpot. The open-source alternative to Figma, with prototyping, components, variants and design tokens. Worth knowing even if your team uses Figma.

Figma Community. Free templates, icons, illustrations and full design systems. Check here before building something from scratch.

Leonardo. Adobe's open-source tool for generating accessible color palettes. Especially useful for design systems and data visualization; start with the theme builder.

Viz Palette. Tests whether a color palette still works for people with color vision deficiencies. Basic hygiene for accessible charts.

Tableau Public. A gallery of interactive visualizations you can explore, a good reference for how other people present data.

Krita. Free, open-source digital painting, with frame-by-frame 2D animation and a strong set of brushes.

Reading tools

I keep my design books as ePub files. These are the apps that make that pleasant:

Calibre. The Swiss Army knife of ebooks: organizes your library, converts between formats, edits metadata and sends books to e-readers.

Koodo Reader. A free, open-source reader that handles EPUB, PDF, MOBI and even comics, and syncs your progress through cloud storage you already have.

Thorium Reader. Built with accessibility at its core (screen readers, text-to-speech, dyslexia-friendly fonts), so it's also a great reference if your project touches accessibility.

Neat Reader. A clean reader for highlighting and annotating as you go.

Yomu. For Mac, iPhone and iPad, syncing your library and notes through iCloud with no subscription. On Windows, Aquile Reader (Microsoft Store) fills a similar role.

And for free books, OpenStax publishes good university textbooks at no cost. It's one of the most underappreciated sites I know.

Everyday useful sites

AlternativeTo. Search for any app and get alternatives by platform and license. Look up Photoshop and you'll find free options.

FMHY. A huge community-maintained index of free software, services and resources.

Perplexity. An answer engine that combines web search with short, cited responses.

Medium. An open publishing platform where a lot of design writing still lives.

Our World in Data. Reliable data on health, economics, education and the environment, for when a project needs real numbers.

RAWGraphs. Turns spreadsheet data into less ordinary charts right in the browser.

Time and Date. Its time zone converter saves a lot of scheduling mistakes.

WeTransfer. Still the simplest way to send someone a large file.

Deku Deals. A video game price tracker (mostly Nintendo Switch) with price history and alerts. Not design, just useful.

Learning

Find OER. A curated collection of links to Open Educational Resources: free, openly licensed materials for teaching and learning.

Codecademy. Interactive coding courses, a gentle way for designers to learn the basics of HTML, CSS and beyond.

Branding and web design

Brand New reviews new logos and identities from around the world. The best place to follow identity trends.
AIGA Eye on Design keeps an eye on where graphic design is going.
Behance is still the easiest place to browse portfolios.
Awwwards collects standout websites (I'll always love the pun).
One Page Love showcases one-page sites, a format worth studying.
SiteInspire is a simple, accurate web design gallery.
Web Designer Depot publishes articles and news on web design.

Inspiration

But Does It Float curates art and design with a lean toward the experimental and abstract.
Les Graphiquants is a Paris graphic design and art direction studio whose portfolio is worth studying.
Grafik is an online magazine about contemporary graphic design, illustration and branding.
Fonts In Use documents typefaces in real projects (hopefully with less Papyrus).
Abduzeedo is a design inspiration blog; the typography tag in particular.
Creative Boom, Fubiz and e-flux cover the wider creative and art world.
Artsy helps you appreciate art and museums better.
IMP Awards archives movie posters, the latest and the classics.
Jessica Hische, a lettering artist and designer for our time.
Feltron, Nicholas Felton's site, a landmark for personal data design.
Francesco Franchi on the AGI site, for editorial and information design.
Calibro, a Milan studio working in information design and data visualization.
The Pudding makes interactive visual essays about culture, music and society. A key reference for visual storytelling.
Information is Beautiful is a long-running home of data visualization, and its awards are a good showcase of the best infographics.
The Webby Awards winners show the year's best websites, apps and digital work.

Worth a look, not yet sorted

Are.na, a calm space for collecting and connecting references.
UX Tools challenges, practice prompts for sharpening UX skills.
Goodpatch, a design firm worth following.
Cool Hunting, on design, culture and products.
Mondo, for beautifully designed posters and collectibles.
McMaster-Carr, an industrial supply catalog often praised for fast, clear, no-nonsense web design.
RSS-Bridge, which generates RSS feeds for sites that don't offer one.

Design games

These are games and browser toys that train a real design skill. The trick is to play with attention, not just for the score.

The Bézier Game. Trace shapes with the pen tool using as few nodes as possible. A clean path with 6 nodes beats a messy one with 14, and it transfers straight to Illustrator and Figma.

Shape Type. Letters with distorted Bézier curves that you drag back into shape. To fix a curve you first have to understand what makes it right, which is a sneaky lesson in type anatomy.

Can't Unsee. Two almost identical versions of an interface; pick the better one. It trains your eye for spacing, alignment, hierarchy and contrast, the same details that separate a finished design from an almost finished one.

Mini Motorways. A traffic management game (Dinosaur Polo Club, 2019) with almost no text and no numbers on screen, yet perfectly readable. A lesson in how color and shape carry information.

Ape Out. An action game (2019) with a restricted palette, flat silhouettes and expressive type drawing on Saul Bass and Swiss Style. Visual language does all the work a conventional interface would.

If you try one thing from this list today, make it The Bézier Game. Then open the last icon you drew and count its nodes.