NETROOM
The workhorse palette generator: hit space for a new set of five, lock the one that works and keep spinning the rest. Beyond the generator there's a whole kit - extracting colours from a photo, contrast checking, colour-blindness simulation, collections and community palettes. It works without an account, but the free tier stores only 10 palettes, 1 project and 5 favourite colours. Pro at around $3/month lifts the limits and the ads. iOS app, Figma plugin.
The de facto standard for UI/UX: layouts, components, auto layout, prototypes, design tokens and Dev Mode for handoff - all in the browser and in real time, with no “send me the latest file”. The free Starter plan gives unlimited drafts, UI kits and a small daily AI credit allowance. Past that you pay per seat: Professional is $16/month for a full seat, $12 for a dev seat and $3 for a collab seat; Organization and Enterprise cost more but add shared libraries and admin controls.
A complete 3D pipeline in one free application: modelling, sculpting, retopology, UV, rigging, animation, simulation, Cycles and EEVEE rendering, compositing and even video editing. The 5.x line brought a new colour management system with wide-gamut and HDR support. Licensed GPL-2.0-or-later and owned by its contributors, so 'it went paid' is structurally impossible here. Funded by the Development Fund. The learning curve is genuinely steep.
One framework on top of more than 200 icon sets - roughly 250,000 icons behind a single syntax. Drop in the web component or the React, Vue or Svelte wrapper, write the icon name, and data is fetched from the API and cached; you can also bundle sets offline. Figma and Sketch plugins included. The framework itself is MIT, but the icon sets carry their own licenses - check the specific set before shipping it commercially.
Palettes are usually judged as five circles in a row, which lies to you: swatches say nothing about how the colours behave once one of them covers 60% of a page. Realtime Colors paints a full demo landing page - nav, buttons, cards, body copy - so you see real proportions. Set text, background, primary, secondary and accent, check contrast, swap fonts. Exports to CSS, SCSS, Tailwind and PNG. Completely free with no pro tier, and there is a Figma plugin.
Over twenty thousand flat illustrations in one consistent style, recolourable right in the gallery and exportable as SVG or PNG. Free, no attribution, commercial use allowed - you just cannot resell them in packs or build a competing service on top. The gallery is a shop window for a subscription design agency, so it lives exactly as long as that business does: grab what you need now and keep a copy in your own repo.
A cloud studio that not only generates a 3D model from text or images but also gets it game-ready: quad remeshing, polygon reduction, levels of detail and AI texturing with PBR. Its export list is the widest in its class: FBX, GLB, OBJ, STL, 3MF, USDZ, BLEND and DAE, plus a pay-as-you-go REST API. There is no rigging or animation. Starter credits are free with no card, and Basic costs $12 a month when billed annually.
A library of 3D icons rendered in Blender: 120 subjects across three camera angles and four styles - clay, gradient, color and premium - which works out to over 1,400 files. You get 2400×2400 PNGs plus .blend and .fbx sources, and a Figma file and plugin, so colour and angle stay yours to tweak. Licensed CC0: commercial work, edits and remixes with no attribution required. The only paid part is early access to an online editor. By Vijay Verma.
The official React wrapper for Font Awesome. On its own it does nothing: you also need @fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core and at least one icon package, free-solid or free-regular. Icons render as SVG, with size, rotation, layering and animation controlled by props. Import icons by name or the entire set lands in your bundle. The code is MIT, but the free icons are CC BY 4.0 and most of the collection sits behind the paid Pro subscription. If you would rather not pay, look at lucide-react. React 18 and 19.
Three hundred-odd icons from the Tailwind team, drawn in one consistent style across four sizes: 24 outline, 24 solid, 20 solid and 16 micro. Each icon is its own React component, imports are named, tree-shaking works and nothing extra reaches the bundle. Zero dependencies, MIT, commercial use fine. The set is deliberately small: when the symbol you need is missing - and it often is - you either draw it or move to lucide-react with over a thousand. Updates are rare, which suits a fixed set.
One component covering 200+ icon sets and well over 200,000 icons: write <Icon icon="mdi:home" /> and you're done. Nothing lands in your bundle - SVGs are fetched on demand from the public API, or from offline @iconify-json/* packages when calling out to the network isn't acceptable. The difference from lucide-react is the model: there you tree-shake individual React components, here you load by name at runtime. Ideal when a content editor picks the icon, not a developer. React 16+, MIT.
Over nine thousand icons in six weights - thin through fill, switched by a prop, with size and colour inherited from the surrounding text. Server Components get their own entry point, @phosphor-icons/react/dist/ssr, because the main package uses context and needs 'use client'. Import icons by name or the whole family lands in your bundle. Last release May 2025 - finished rather than abandoned. MIT, icons included.
Around 300 hand-drawn 15x15 icons from the Radix team (now WorkOS), built to match their primitives: one grid, one stroke weight, plain React components with no runtime. The thing to know: the package is frozen - 1.3.2 shipped in November 2024 and no new icons are being added. The 15px grid is small and does not always sit well next to 16px text. New projects usually pick lucide-react instead, with thousands of icons and active releases. Use this one if you are already on Radix Themes. MIT.
Over 5900 Tabler SVG icons wrapped as React components: one consistent 24px grid, stroke-width, size and color driven by props, plus a filled variant. It sits on top of the @tabler/icons package, peers on React 16+, and is MIT for everything including commercial work. Importing from the barrel file in dev pulls thousands of modules and visibly slows a cold Vite start - use named imports or per-icon subpaths instead. Releases land regularly and the set keeps growing.
A single-screen WCAG 2.0 contrast checker: enter text and background colours plus size and weight, and it returns the ratio with an AA/AAA verdict. The point isn't the check but the fix - when a pair fails, the tool computes the nearest colour that passes instead of sending you back to fiddle with the palette. Free, no signup, no ads, runs in the browser. Reach for it to repair one specific pair fast, not to rebuild a whole palette.
A catalogue of showy React components built on Tailwind and Framer Motion: hero sections, bento grids, glowing borders, parallax effects. It follows the shadcn model - you copy the code into your project and edit it, with nothing added to package.json. The base library is free and fine for commercial work. Premium blocks and templates sit behind All-Access: $169/year, $199 once for lifetime, or $1,590 for a team of ten. Reselling the components is not allowed.
The veteran of colour tools: a wheel with harmony rules, palette and gradient extraction from a photo, WCAG contrast checks and colour-blindness simulation. Palettes save to Creative Cloud Libraries and show up inside Photoshop, Illustrator and Express - that hook is the real reason people stay. The service itself is free and needs only an Adobe ID; you pay for the apps the palettes travel into. Adobe is steadily folding it into Express.
Adobe's generative studio: images, vector, video and audio, plus third-party models in one window. Its pitch isn't picture quality but legal cleanliness - the models were trained on Adobe Stock, licensed and public-domain content, and paid plans come with Adobe's copyright indemnification. The free tier gives 25 generative credits a month; Standard is $9.99 for 2,000 credits, Pro $19.99, climbing to $199.99. Worth it when output ships commercially.
A playground of ready-made CSS animations: pick an effect, tune duration, easing, delay and direction, preview it on a button or some text, and take away only the CSS you actually need - no kilobytes of somebody else's keyframes. Free, no signup, and the generated code is under the FreeBSD licence, so commercial use raises no questions. Unlike a drop-in library it hands you one tuned keyframe rather than the whole set.
A service for bringing finished models to life rather than generating them: Animate Anything rigs and animates an animal, a person or a vehicle on its own. Alongside it come Generate Anything, a model library and game SDKs, plus an API and plugins for Blender, Unity, Maya, 3ds Max, Unreal and Roblox. The free tier covers students, personal use and teams under $100K in annual revenue, and Micro costs $50 a month. The anything.world domain now redirects to everythinguniver.se: the company is Everything Universe, while the pages still carry the Anything World brand.
Apple's official design guidelines covering every platform at once - iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS and visionOS. Not inspiration but reference: how each system component behaves, what spacing and type to use, and where your freedom ends and an App Store review requirement begins. Read it before drawing screens, or expect to redraw half of them. Free, no developer account needed, and Figma libraries ship alongside the text.
A browser-based mockup and graphics editor: over 5,000 scenes across devices, apparel, packaging, print and branding. Drop your design onto a T-shirt or a box, move the light and shadows, export PNG, JPEG, WEBP or MP4 video. Figma and Adobe Express plugins mean nothing to install. There's a limited free tier, Lite at $9 and Pro at $19 a month billed yearly, or a $129 one-off Lifetime. Commercial use is allowed; reselling the scenes is not.
The shop window for what currently counts as top-tier web design: Site of the Day, monthly and annual awards, jury scores for design, usability, creativity and content. Browsing, filtering by tech stack and picking apart other people's solutions is free and needs no account. The money starts when you want in: submitting a site carries a fee, and there's a Pro membership, Academy courses and conferences. More a trend calendar than a pattern library.
An SVG background generator: waves, grids, stars, circuit boards, confetti - around 35 presets, each with sliders for colour, density and tilt. Output is SVG, so it weighs almost nothing and scales to any screen. Watch the licence: free downloads come under CC BY 4.0, meaning attribution is mandatory. Money removes it - $5.99 for Basic, $35.99 for Pro, licensed to a named project. Reselling the backgrounds themselves is off the table.
Adobe's portfolio network: image-heavy case studies, feeds by discipline, job listings, freelance services and talent search. It differs from Dribbble in format - not a single-image shot but a whole project written up with process and outcome, which is why clients actually browse it. Publishing and browsing are free, and half the industry already has an Adobe account. Paid parts: a Pro membership with deeper analytics and Recruiter Pro for hiring.
One button and three sliders - complexity, contrast, randomness - and out comes an organic blob as SVG for the corner of a card or behind a heading. Copy it as code or download the file; no signup, no charge. Still up, though development moved to Haikei by the same z creative labs, which adds waves, grids and gradient backgrounds to the same blobs. Blobmaker survives as the fast single-purpose version: roll the dice, grab the shape, leave.
Illustrations assembled like a kit: take one artist's collection and swap poses, faces, clothing, backgrounds and colours until it matches your product. Export as PNG or SVG, with Figma and Sketch plugins so you needn't work in the browser. The licence is generous - commercial and personal use with no attribution - but you can't resell the illustrations or put them on merch. Some variations are gated: Pro runs $12 a month or $96 a year.
A CSS gradient generator: tweak colours, angle and stops, then copy the linear-gradient or radial-gradient straight into your stylesheet. Free, no account. Around the generator sits a reference section - syntax explainers, curated colour shades, and gradients lifted from real brands like Stripe and Instagram - handy when you want a proven combination rather than guesswork. Running since 2017, maintained by the Designstripe team (now Visual). The CSS it emits is yours to use.
Editors' picks