Here are 8 free tools for design and development to test out

In September, I created a post on 8 free design resources and this month I wanted to share some pretty cool free tools to utilize. Here is a collection of resources I've been looking into and using this past month.

1.    PatternIco

PatternIco is one of my new favorite tools. It’s advertised as a web app for creating seamless icon patterns and backgrounds fast and easy without any Photoshop wizardry - use it free for anything. You can choose from hundreds of icons to create patterns with or upload your own. It’s quicker than creating patterns in Illustrator and you can download the pattern to a png.

There’s also a really cool emoji version of the tool. Here’s the default emoji pattern but you can choose from thousands of emojis to make your own and customize everything from size and transparency to background color.

2.    Twine

I know a lot of e-learning designers/developers use Twine for building branching to think through their designs but it’s also a pretty cool tool where you can build in more interactivity to use it as a final product.

Recently Kotaku posted about a game made in Twine, it’s called self-love hotel. The name is a bit odd but the concept and product are sweet. It’s a visual and text based adventure all about treating yourself by indulging in walks through a garden and eating good food at a hotel.

Download the game here and you can also open it in Twine to see how it was made! https://malibudreamhaus.itch.io/self-love-hotel

3.    Mister Horse

We’re getting all of these really interesting names for games and products. Mister Horse is a plugin you use in Adobe After Effects that makes animating objects and text easy peasy. You simply drag and drop the animation onto the text or object you want and adjust the settings.

Special thanks to my colleague Mariia Berenzina for introducing this to me.

4.    Inform

I haven’t used Inform yet but it looks promising. My colleague Jed Esposito is to thank for introducing me to it! The description of the tool is A design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. Code that reads like English.

Basically, you can create interactive branching fiction just by writing and then when people play it they interact by responding with specific words. There’s also a database of Interactive Fiction Games created with Inform and other tools that you can browse at your own leisure. See here: https://ifdb.tads.org/

5.    CollectUI

A colleague in the field, Joshua Stoner, helped me to find CollectUI. He’d been posting nifty UI designs daily and I stumbled upon Collect UI from one of his tags. CollectUI describe itself as Daily inspiration collected from daily ui archive and beyond. Based on Dribbble shots, hand picked, updating daily.

This is a place where you will be inspired by UI Designs for your next project. I know I was!

6.    AnimateMate

For those of you on Macs this is a great plugin for Sketch. If you don’t know what Sketch is this is also a bonus. Sketch is a tool for creating mock ups for websites, apps, etc. It’s super easy to use and has changed the way that I design (for the better.) AnimateMate is plugin that helps you to easily animate your UI designs/mock ups, check out the video to learn just how easy it is.

7.    Adobe Muse Plugin Freebies

With Muse you can create websites without any code, it’s pretty nifty for creating prototypes or even final versions of products. I’m really looking forward to building scrolling interactive infographics with Muse. There are tons of rad plugin freebies you can add to Muse including things like animations and full screen video backgrounds. Thanks to my colleague Megan Roers for getting be on the Muse bandwagon. Check out all the free plugins.

8.  The Future of Learning Slack Group

Last but not least. Matt Smith has started a Slack for those in learning. I know there are a couple out there and we even had our own HipChat for a bit. I really like this Slack group because there are so many people from around the world in the field sharing. It’s neat to learn about what’s on everyone’s minds in the community. You can join by following the instructions in Matt’s blog post.

-Mel