There are a few really fun tools this month, including one that enables you to type with randomly chosen illustrated letters from an Instagram design project, and another that makes data visualisations out of the most popular viewport sizes in your site analytics.
Dive in to get a taste of the best web design utilities to surface over the last few weeks.
01. Slemma
Slemma is a tool for creating charts and diagrams from data that’s spread inconveniently across multiple sources. It will pull in information from Dropbox, Google Docs, Google Analytics and dozens of other databases, so that it’s held in one centralised location that everyone can access. You can set up your dashboard exactly as you want, so data is displayed your way.
02. Viewportify
Some people have been making data visualisations out of the most popular viewport sizes to come up in their site analytics. When Phil Hawksworth couldn’t find a tool out there to do this automatically he set about building one. “I thought these were beautiful and useful and wanted to make it easier for people to create their own and highlight the need for responsive web design,” he says on his site. Now you can make one for your site, and share it proudly on Viewportify.
03. Hello Many
Hello Many assembles the best UI elements including themes, UI kits and icons. It’s a nicely curated selection and you can sign up to receive a regular list of new ones in their newsletter.
04. Type to Design
This fun app enables you to type with letters randomly chosen from the 36 Days of Type project, an experiment in which designers and illustrators drew letters in interesting ways and uploaded them to Instagram. Type to Design selects letters randomly from the #36daysoftype hashtag when you type, so your words will never appear the same way twice. You can fine-tune how your final phrase appears by clicking on non-optimal or less legible letters until it’s perfect.
05. Vibrant.js
Extract the most prominent colours from an image with Vibrant.js. This library categorises the colours it pulls out as vibrant, dark vibrant, light vibrant, muted, dark muted and light muted, giving you a usable palette from the image.
Next page: five more of the best web design tools in June...
