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Apps, Tools & Resources For Creatives
50
items these are the apps i use most frequently, usually during the creative process. some you know, others might be new to you - they're all useful!
Sections
6
Images
Colour & Fonts
Writing
Inspiration
Graphic Tools
Activities
Images
Image apps for organization and manipulation, as well as sources for genuinely copyright free, public domain graphics.
- Invite code COMEGARDEN - I paid for Pro after 10 minutes. Look at the Discover page and you'll see why! (You can import Pinterest images - do it NOW before it's too late!)
refern. | The curated image reference platform
You can use PureRef for storyboarding, moodboarding, book layouts - anything where you need a visual overview of a project. Zoom in and out, pan, add notes and crop images.
PureRef
Print Screen with extra features so you can capture exactly what you want, adjust the selection, save it in whichever format you want. find similar images on Google - so much more than a screen cap!
Lightshot — screenshot tool for Mac & Win
The new Pinterest, except without all the AI and 6 ads to every 1 pin. Yet.
Cosmos
Images in the public domain that can be used for free and without violating copyright.
Public Work by Cosmos
Are.na is: 1. online software for saving and organizing the content that is important to you and 2. a toolkit for assembling new worlds from the scraps of the old Students, hobbyists and what we call connected knowledge collectors have been the core of our...Are.na as "playlists, but for ideas" or an "Internet memory palace." If this speaks to you, try it now:
Are.na
Same Energy is an image search engine, where you can choose a search result to get more like that, and keep going, and going.
Same Energy
Over 10 000 pages of images. You have to hunt a bit, but it's worth it! (Read the About page for full details)
British Library’s albums | Flickr
Images, text, film - a whole lotta inspiration here.
National Library of Medicine - Digital Collections
More functionality is available by subscription, but if all you're looking for is images, this is a great free resource.
Free Stock Photos, PNGs, Templates & Mockups | rawpixel
Freeject is great for images, but also offers copyright free music for instagram, tiktok etc.
FREEJECT
Royalty free stock photos and images. Over 400,000 free stock photos for commercial use.
Morguefile - free photographs for commercial use
Colour & Fonts
All sorts of palette and colour scheme tools, with a nod to fonts. Although these all -technically- do the same thing, each app does it in a different way, giving different results.
Powerful color tools including an eyedropper, color picker, and palette generator. Quickly generate palettes from any page. Sample colors from any page. Generate gradients, tints, or shades based on any color.
Colorway
Trianglify.io is a tool to generate low-poly backgrounds, textures, and vectors. You can adjust colours, cell size, and intensity.
Trianglify.io · Low Poly Pattern Generator
I really like this palette generator because adjusting the sample selection and number of colours gets you lots of results.
Create Natural Palettes from Images
Love this colour picker for generating gradient-like palettes, and being able to adjust tint, shade, tone etc.
The Data Viz Color Picker
Very important for online design! The color pairings follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA based on a contrast ratio of 4.5:1. The pairings have sufficient contrast for use with normal text, large text and graphics.
Accessible Color Palette Generator | WCAG Compliant
Generate a color palette from image or image url. Color palette based on the image's primary colors or mannually select colors from image. Download palette to Adobe Photoshop swatches , Pdf, Svg and more.
iColorpalette - Color palette from images
The palette generated is simple, but 2 dozen variations are given to accompany it.
ColorSpace - Color Palettes Generator and Color Gradient Tool
These should look familiar if you've ever searchd for colour palettes. Colour Palettes have been doing this for a long time!
ColorPalettes.net: Color Palette Ideas
Color-hex basically gives you a colour's family tree and DNA and then let's you play Mad Scientist with it.
color-hex
Simple, but fun. Tweak the pigment and lighting of 2 colours and get a 4-colour palette for each.
Pigment by ShapeFactory | Simple Color Palette Generator
This app requires a bit of knowledge, or a bit of patience. Just poke around and see what happens.
Palettte App
Paletton is a highly customisable colour scheme designer. Adjust the colour disc and see in real time how that affects the scheme.
Paletton - The Color Scheme Designer
This book was used by Charles Darwin to describe colours in nature when on his voyage on the HMS Beagle - it has a HISTORY.
Werner's Nomenclature of Colours for Sciences
Colour is used differently in Japanese art and design than in the West. The palettes in these books are perfect when you're stuck in a colour rut, or need to challenge yourself.
Color Combinations Dictionary Vol.1 & 2
Build your own fonts, share them, download other fonts that have been created - free!
FontStruct | Build, Share, Download Fonts
An interactive reference tool to see what different fonts look like in different real world applications.
Fonts in Use
Writing
Writing apps and tools, as well as niche references and sources of information.
I use notion for the directory tree and supreme ease of creating new pages, images, links etc. It's a bit like visionboarding your writing.
Notion Desktop App for Mac & Windows
Everybody knows this one. I use 1% of the functionality and it's still worth it.
Scrivener | #1 Novel & Book Writing Software For Writers
Groundbreaking, I know, but Keep is my favourite tool for note-taking and writing chunks I can reference later, then send to Scrivener.
Google Keep
This is an exhaustive database of folk tales et al - start here, no matter what your query.
Folktexts: A library of folktales, folklore, fairy tales, and
mythology
This is an online database of Japanese folklore that is always being updated. An invaluable resource if this is your area of interest.
Yokai.com
A massive spreadsheet of collected meanings for every flower imaginable.
Victorian Language of Flowers - Floriography
This illustrated guide to floriography is lovely in its simplicity of presentation, bringing the focus to the flowers. Each flower has an example of how it could be combined to send a particular message.
Floriography: Illustrated Guide to Flowers
Along with flowers, birds are another powerful symbol that can be used in your writing when you want to say something without saying it,
Ornithography: Illustrated Bird Lore & Symbolism
Making playlists for a story, character, event etc. can help you explorethese elements and see things from a different angle. Music is a powerful source of inspiration!
Spotify - Music Streaming
Geocities for the 21st Century, Neocities is a social network of web sites bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web. They offer free static web hosting and tools that allow you to create your own html-based web site.
Neocities
Inspiration
See the incredible things other creatives bring forth into the world. Dn't discount anything - often inspiration is found in the strangest places.
So Super Awesome has been promoting makers of awesome since 2009, including visual art, handcrafts, artisan crafts, papercraft and more.
So Super Awesome
Colossal is an online art magazine that celebrates contemporary art and visual culture across a wide range of creative disciplines. Art by humans, for humans.
Colossal
Original art for sale, and a wonderful source of inspiration (look with your eyes, not with your hands)
DegreeArt.com - The Original Online Art Gallery
Graphic Tools
All sorts of online image converters, editors, and random manipulators, all online, so you can access them anywhere.
This tool does exactly what it says: resize, overlay, add borders, cut out, even add glitter!
Online Image Editor
PineTools has several sets of tools for image conversion, editing, colour picking, and several that are Mathematics-based.
PineTools - Free online tools
ConvertICO is a free online PNG to ICO file converter. It is used to convert Desktop Icons, App Icons as well as the much needed favicons for websites. It is fast, free and easy to use.
ConvertICO.com - Convert PNG to ICO and ICO to PNG files
Dithering is a technique you can use to make a lower bit-depth blend colors by introducing random noise to the image in strategic locations. This can be useful when you need to represent an image with lower bit depth than you captured it at, or when ...
Dither it!
RawTherapee is a powerful, cross-platform raw photo processing system, released as Free Software. It is designed for developing raw files from a broad range of digital cameras and targeted at users ranging from newcomers who wish to broaden their und...
RawPedia - RawTherapee
Decker is a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior. Anyone can use Decker to create E-Zines, organize their notes, give presentations, build adventure games, or even ju...
Decker - Beyond Loom
A basic online recolouring app for clothing - though it could be used on any surface
Recolor - Pixelcut
Activities
What if finding inspiration was merely a matter of gazing through a different lens or trying out a new tool? Kickstart Creativity is a deck of 50 cards—each with a creative exercise—designed to prompt unexpected ways of thinking. Choose an action car...
Kickstart Creativity: 50 Prompt Cards
We’re used to regarding inspiration as something that arrives more or less at random; it is in fact a skill that we can learn to develop in ourselves and call on whenever we need it. Inspiration gives us a toolkit for generating new ideas. These card...
Inspiration Cards: 52 Creativity Exercises