What I am learning in this season is that not everything has to be homemade and not everything in the business or in our personal life has to be touched by my hand. The learning curve is steep for a high-achiever haha.
Anyway, the reason we’re gathered here today…
I have found a few fun resources/tools which can make your work and process easier and/or more fun, while trying to stay consistent with your brand and work smarter rather than harder. Because we could all use a little (a lot) of that this year.
Just me again?
Here are 5 websites for the recovering creatives who don’t want to have to do it all from scratch anymore.
1- Get inspired — Design Daily Report
Although this website (has a chrome extension) is called Designer Daily Report, it really is for any creative mind wanting a fresh daily dose of inspiration. At the top of the page you have a font, a portfolio piece, a palette, and branding of the day. Then you have a whole feed of fresh useful links, some creative projects, then some specific things like Figma or Instagram picks. There are also some discussions you can join… inspiration and community building. And it’s free!
2- Pack-up! — Pacdora
The land of packaging with countless of templates, die-lines, and 3D mockups. It supports multiples formats and so many rendering presets. This one isn’t free but if you don’t want to sign up, you could still use it as a visualization tool. It could even be used in your concept and presentation process with the client as you can upload your art to any of the 3D mockups without having to pay. Then you could record a walkthrough video for client to ask for feedback. You can also purchase individual exports if you find it valuable for the project in the end.
3- Pantone who? — Freetone
You’ve heard it… Pantone and Adobe are splitting and us kids are the ones who suffer. No more Pantone swatches for us! What if I told you a good samaritan created an alternative. That’s Freetone! In their own words “they’ve liberated the Pantone colour palette” and it’s free for all of us to download. I’m personally quite thrilled because we use those swatches on every single full branding projects we do. So handy!
4- Humanize your brand — Humaaans
Did someone need illustrations? Search no more! This websites has all kinds of people illustrations with great diversity and representation, which you can edit and customize according to what you’re looking for. They have a lot of free one (small PNG download) and some pro ones too. It’s pretty fun to play with and could save you so much time, especially if you’re on the branding team of a modern start-up or needing to create presentations often.
5- Smooth scroll — Lenis
This last one is straight to the point and it’s for my developers in here. The keyword is smooth scroll! This website (sends you to Github) has a whole smooth scroll library and it looks sleek. I know smooth scroll is a little bit of a hot debate but they offer a few great arguments in favor of it. If you like smooth scrolling, you will be very satisfied.
That’s all for today! Please share with us what new cool tool or resource you’ve found — we love new discoveries. Also remember? I’m trying to be better at asking and receiving help.