Throughout 2014, I posted a weekly set of interesting design-related links from around the web. As we close out the year, I wanted to take a look back at some of the best resources from these posts. From great responsive web design tools to silly GIF utilities, here are our top 100 design news links from 2014. Enjoy, and be sure to leave a comment and let us know what you’d add to the list.
Design Apps & Collaboration Tools
1. Asana Desktop, Tablet & Mobile Apps
Asana is a super helpful project and team collaboration tool. They added great iOS apps to their platform in the fall of 2014.
2. Zeplin
A new collaboration app for UI designer and front-end developers.
3. Apple TestFlight
TestFlight is a new free app that allows app developers to invite you to beta test their apps on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Once you join a developer’s beta test through email invitation, TestFlight makes it easy to install and update new beta versions as they become available.
4. PageLayers
An awesome website screenshot app for Mac OSX that converts web pages into PS files with separate layers for all page elements.
5. Affinity Design
After 4 years in the making, this vector art creation software has just launched! It’s only $39 and available in the App Store.
6. Mitya App
A new interaction prototype tool, available for $99.
7. Team Reporter
Cut down the amount of meetings with this team update too.
8. LayUp
LayUp is a collaborative project between Khoi Vinh and Adobe. It’s a new iPad app that plans to turbo-charge the brainstorming phase of the design process (and will play nicely with Adobe’s marquee apps, too).
9. HR Mac App
Download a free app that will help you track time spent on individual tasks and freelance projects.
10. Sketch to App Store
Generate images ready for the App Store directly from Sketch. You’ll save a ton of time with this tool, which exports images for all iPhone sizes.
Icon Resources
11. Animate SVG Icons
Download the kit and learn how to animate SVG icons with CSS and Snap on CodyHouse.
12. Make App Icon
Drop your design file in the on-page toaster drop zone, and this convenient service will generate all of the app icon sizes you’ll need for your app!
13. Anicorns
A library of animated icons by Sebas and Clim.
14. Bootstrap Icon
A cheat sheet of all existing Bootstrap icons.
15. Marka
A collection of beautiful icon transformations, Marka can make your transitions between icons and shapes in code look amazing.
16. iOS7 Icon Template
Everything you need to design iOS7 app icons.
17. Iconogen
Easily generate all of the nice site add-ons like Faceicons, Windows tiles, Apple Touch icons and iOS icons too.
18. Map Glyphs
This is the ultimate css map font, which contains 301 scaleable vector map icons of the world, continents, globes, countries and states in a single font.
19. Ramotion Realistic iOS App Icons
Browser an inspiring collection of realistic app icons made by the folks of Ramotion. This is a great rebuttal to the current flat design trend.
20. IcoMelon
A modern svg icons library for the web.
Design Community Platforms
21. OpenDesign
An initiative to get more designers involved in the open-source movement.
22. Dribbble Meetups
Dribbble has created a section on their site to manage the ever-growing number of global meetups. If you want to host your own meetup, there’s a form for that too.
23. Mix by FiftyThree
A new platform from the makers of the Paper app, that encourages users to create new visual work, learn together, and practice with templates. The community site has the following sections to dig into: Learn, Sketch, Play, Write, Design and Think.
24. Skillpocket
Get one-on-one advice from expert professionals in your field. App available for iPhone.
25. DesignedIn
DesignedIn is an exclusive community platform where design students, alumni, faculty and employers come together to learn, teach and work on real-world projects in an effort to place students into jobs after college. It reached its goal on Kickstarter, so expect the platform to ship in the near future!
26. Faluta
Trade billable hours with other creative professionals who have skills that compliment your freelance projects. Join a community where you can pay other creators and get paid.
27. Ocean
Join a community of designers who are sharing real feedback on each other’s design projects.
28. The Meetup Guide
Crafted with care by designer Ciera Holtzenhal (a member of the Creative Market community), The Meetup Guide is the quintessential, affordable bundle resource that contains documentation and assets that’ll help you create, plan and host a local event series.
29. CMX Summit
A new summit series that explores the business value of community building. This one’s for all the community champions out there!
30. Start-up Genome
Explore the start-up community where you live.
User Experience Best Practices
31. UX Companion
A handy glossary of user experience theories, tools and principles — all in a tidy little iOS App. Download in the App Store.
32. BUX
A directory of better user experience tools.
33. UX Design Weekly
Subscribe to this email newsletter that hand picks a list of the best user experience design links for you each week.
34. UX Kits — 5 Lessons Learned
Read a nice blog post from CM shop owner UX Kits about how they crafted their strategy for selling digital assets.
35. UXPin
An app that makes designing quick and easy through wireframe and modules.
36. Job Stories
Explore a refined process to replace Personas and User Stories when conceptualizing digital work.
37. User Onboarding
Learn the flows for how popular web apps onboard new users. Explore first-time UX teardowns of apps like Inbox by Gmail, Yo, Asana iOS, Basecamp and many more.
38. Design Details Podcast
Starting in January 2015, each show will be a 30-60 minute conversation with design leaders in the community.
39. Six UX
A collection of awesome six second transitions and animations found within apps.
40. UX is not UI
Erik Flowers posted an article two years ago about how UX is not UI. He had numerous request for a single page, 2-column comparison document of UX vs. UI.
iOS Resources
41. Teehan+Lax iOS8 GUI PSD
Teehan+Lax are back with their latest free PSD download that contains all of the GUI elements found in the public release of iOS 8.
42. Prott
Rapid prototyping for iOS. Capture an idea, add animation, sync multiple screens in realtime and preview your work in progress with others! Available in the App Store.
43. iOS Human Interface Guidelines
Available in the iTunes store, grab this free iBook and learn how to create superlative user experiences that are founded on Apple’s design principles and guidelines.
44. iOS Design Guidelines
Explore extensive guidelines created to facilitate iOS design by Ivo Mynttinen.
45. Capptivate
A beautiful iOS UI animation library.
46. DesignCode.io
Learn iOS design and Xcode at the same time. Build a news reader app from Sketch to the App Store.
47. Retinize.It
The best Photoshop action out there that helps designers prepare assets for iOS or optimize them for retina-display websites.
48. iOS UI Kit Actions for Photoshop
Jérémy Paul has created a fancy set of actions that lets you create entire interfaces in just a few clicks in Photoshop. He included tons of options for iPhone 4, 5, and 6, and an exhaustive user manual to boot.
49. Execute iOS
Get educated about what it takes to develop iOS apps by Josh Long and Sam Soffes.
50. iOS Goodies
A massive archive of resources specifically collected about iOS. Plus, it’s updated weekly!
User Inteface Resources
51. uilang
Have a look at a minimal, ui-focused programming language for web designers. Simple insert uilang.js in your page to build interfaces such as popovers, tabs, galleries, overlays and more. No programming experience is required. By Benjamin De Cock.
52. UI Origins
A nice little round-up of origin stories of common UI elements.
53. Web UI Design Best Practices
Full of examples and analysis of best practices by 33 tech companies, this eBook shares valuable insights into great UI design practices by the experts.
54. iOS 8 UI Kit for Sketch
Explore a generous portion of UI elements created by—from the starting point of the popular Teehan+Lax iOS resources — repurposed and extended just for users of Sketch.
55. Web UI Design Patterns
Dig into this free ebook by UXPin that explores trends and best practices of user interface design patterns in 2014.
56. TabPatterns
A collection of UI design patterns found in Tablet experiences.
57. The Origin of the Hamburger Menu
Ever wonder where the Hamburger Menu came from? Dig into this Evernote conversation between Norm Cox and Geoff Alday to have a look at the history of this modern UI element of controversy. Yep, it goes all the way back to 1981.
58. How Now Web Cow
An upcoming tutorial site that plans to offer lessons about building websites and interactive UI design projects, produced by Noah Stokes of Bold.
59. PS Actions for iOS Design
A PS action set to quickly build iOS UI.
60. Bootstrap 3 Vector UI Kit
A free collection of all the Twitter Bootstrap 3 UI controls.
Gifs! Gifs! Gifs!
61. Yix.Io
A new animated gif group competition app called Yix that you’ll love playing with your friends.
62. Gif Pop!
Make custom physical gif cards through the lenticular printing process.
63. Generate Gif
Do you love Sketch App and animated gifs? Well, now you can combine the two with this nifty plugin, that empowers you to generate animated gifs from a sequence of art boards in Sketch.
64. JIF/GIF
A modest proposal by Andy Baio in which he attempts to define ‘JIF’ as the format and ‘GIF’ as the culture.
65. Giffer App
Whatever kind of animated gifs you like, now you can quickly and easily create or collect them on the go with this awesome iPhone app.
66. GIF Brewery
Designed and offered exclusively for Mac OS X, GIF Brewery lets users convert brief clips from video files into GIFs and offers a ton of editing controls too! Now you can start GIF’ing away at work.
67. PopKey
It’s hard not find this funny. PopKey is planned to be the world’s fist animated GIF keyboard. Who needs talking when you can communicate with an animated clips from your favorite movies?
68. GifWit
Organize and search your favorite gifs on the internet, and paste them directly into your preferred apps to share them quickly!
69. GifDeck
Convert your SlideShare Decks into wonderful animated gifs.
70. Recordit
A free Mac app that helps with screencasting. Includes gif support too!
Color Tools
71. Adaptive Backgrounds
A nifty jquery tool that pulls the dominant color from an image to display it as a background element on a web page.
72. Color Explorer
A variety of free tools for working with color.
73. Flat UI Color Picker
Explore curated hex color codes by hue collections for flat-based UI design work.
74. Skala Color
An extraordinary Mac-based color picker app for designers and developers.
75. The Day’s Color
Enjoy a color digest blog that presents a fresh palette every day of the week. Each palette offers 7 colors — 5 primary hues on top of 2 background colors.
76. Colorful CSS Gradient Generator
Create beautifully blended css hues with this handy generator.
77. CMYK Playing Cards
A very cool concept that uses playing cards to show the tiers of opacity of primary paint colors.
78. The Colors of Motion
Browse color palettes created by using an algorythm that compiles the most commonly used hues found in scenes from popular films.
79. Prisma
Synchronize colors between all your Photoshop design with this handy plugin.
80. Brand Colors
Not sure what the hex color is of a particular brand that you’re using in your project? Have a look at this archive to find hues for many popular brands.
Responsive Resources
81. Macaw
The premier responsive web design tool launched this year, and updated to new versions with more features too!
82. Skala Preview
A tool by Bjango that helps designers ship responsive projects across desktop and mobile.
83. Responsive Web Design Podcast
A brand new podcast launched this year, co-hosted by Karen McGrane and Ethan Marcotte. In each episode, the hosts interview people who make responsive redesign projects happen.
84. Duo
A responsive web dual-panel browser app that helps designers see multiple viewports while creating responsive design work.
85. Responsive Email Patterns
A collection of patterns and modules for building excellent responsive emails.
86. RQRWD
An essential Percentage to Pixels (and vice versa) tool for planning responsive web design.
87. Lemonade
If you’re in need of a responsive grid system, then try Lemonade — a customizable grid made with SASS.
88. Liquidapsive
A small education site that visually demonstrates the differences between static, responsive, adaptive and liquid website formats.
89. Foundation 5
Zurb launched it’s 5th edition of their popular responsive framework.
90. Responsive Comments
A client-side responsive solution for conditional loading of comments.
Font Resources
91. Font Face Ninja
Discover what web fonts are being used across your favorite websites with this handy tool. It’s free, and comes as a bookmarklet, Chrome extension or Safari extension.
92. Typecase
Select the fonts of your choice, and render a live type specimen test sheet in html for your web project.
93. Typ.io
Screnshots of fonts used in visual examples, and links to purchase them.
94. iOS Fonts
Browse and tes drive all font options available for use in iOS projects according to device and OS version compatibility.
95. FontShop WebFonter
A new tool by FontShop that lets users test fonts right on their website.
96. Typewolf
A curated collection of font usage examples found in modern web design.
97. Handmade Font
An incredible font store full of unique, photographic-based 3D display lettering assets for sale.
98. Brick
Explore a selective catalog of web fonts that render well in the browser.
99. OpenType Cookbook
A personal project that Tal Leming has created based on experiences of developing OpenType features back in 2003. The OpenType Cookbook helps designers learn and apply the features that designing fonts in OpenType can provide.
100. Fave Typefaces by Lead Designers
A simple post on TypeWolf that shares the top 3 favorite fonts of popular designers.
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