LINKDING

I've switched to VS Code (finally) and I'm mostly loving it. Started playing around with porting my favorite things and found VS Code Theme Studio. It's "the easiest way to create a theme for VS Code. It's a browser-based theme editor for Visual Studio Code Themes. You can easily design beautiful, polished themes, and deploy them to the VS Code Marketplace."

I'm a fan of all of the Affinity apps, so when it came time to buckle down and do the layout for a children's book I'm working on, I decided to give Publisher a real look. I haven't used InDesign for years, but Publisher mirrors a lot of the concepts and it all came back quickly. With master pages, text styles, text box shapes, preflight check, built-in photo editing tools, and more, it's a top quality publishing app for $25 (regularly $50, 50% off right now).

A scathing but undisputable take from Jason Koebler at Motherboard. "Ive, Apple's Chief Design Officer, is leaving the company. He leaves a legacy that made its products hard to repair and impossible to upgrade."

I think the most common reason I break out color wheels is to find the right success/info/warning/error colors for a web interface. This tool lets you specify a primary color and generates your green, blue, yellow, and red hues to match it.

This is a surprisingly effective _free_ web app (with API) for removing backgrounds from images. Does an outstanding job with hair, the bane of manual background removal.

A well-curated directory of free resources for designers, including plenty of icons, stock photos, and UI mockup kits for Sketch, Photoshop, and more.

Nobody liked coding HTML emails even before mobile. Now you have to plan for so many variables while using CSS and markup restricted for cross-client compatibility. Enjoy this collection of responsive HTML email templates and save the tears.

I'll admit it, I'm not great with designing gradients. This free, curated collection of 180 linear gradients is a welcome addition to my toolbox. Download them in CSS3, Photoshop and Sketch formats.

A free web app for generating high res product mockups for apps. All iOS devices (including iPhone X and Apple Watch), iMac, Macbook, and even Windows machines. Puts your app screenshot in context easily (and for free). ([AppLaunchPad's tool for generating iOS App Store screenshots](https://theapplaunchpad.com/) is pretty sweet-looking, too.)

I love Sketch plugins to the extent that a plugin manager is a necessity. [Sketch Toolbox](http://sketchtoolbox.com/) hasn't been updated for a while, and this new one is pretty sweet.

Web font inspiration and pairing ideas.

A nice compilation of tools for freelancers (and devs and designers in general). Project management, accounting, color tools, font collections, and more.

Angelos Arnis compiled the "Tools I use constantly" on Medium, and it's a great collection of currently-available resources for web (and other) designers.

An excellent running list of ideas for better UI design. Tested in the real world, there are practical tips that can improve any website or interface.

UIPalette combines all of the best tools for finding trends and generating color palettes in one interface. Hailpixel, Color Hunt, Adobe Color CC and more.

I love Tufte. This CSS, along with some basic classes and markup formatting, provides Tufte-compliant formatting for your text.

I've always liked the Streamline icons. The set was just updated, now with 4000 icons for applications and web design. It includes filies for Sketch and Illustrator (and SVG format) with pixel-perfect designs and adjustable line widths.

LaCroix Design Co. wrote up how they use Markdown and [Marked 2](http://marked2app.com) to quickly and easily create beautiful client proposals.