Tools

The A11y Annotation Kit is a comprehensive Figma library that provides standardized accessibility annotation components for design handoffs. It helps designers communicate accessibility requirements to developers through clear, consistent annotations that cover focus states, screen reader labels, keyboard navigation, and more.

The A11y Project is a community-driven effort to make digital accessibility easier through practical, digestible resources and guides. It provides straightforward explanations of accessibility concepts, code examples, and actionable advice that helps designers and developers understand and implement accessibility best practices in their work.

Able is a Figma plugin that helps designers check color contrast ratios, simulate different types of color blindness, and ensure their designs meet WCAG accessibility standards. It integrates seamlessly into the design workflow, allowing real-time accessibility checking without leaving the design environment.

Free browser toolkit for checking design screenshots with contrast analysis, vision simulation, attention heat maps, and alt text support. Includes research-based guidance and a design checklist.

High contrast and neuro-inclusion now mandatory under evolving regulations, reshaping entire design systems. Accessibility moving from checkbox to foundational architecture.

Free CC0 PBR materials, HDRIs, and procedural textures with Substance and Blender-ready files. Covers concrete, stone, fabric, wood, terrain — comprehensive for realistic rendering.

axe DevTools is a powerful browser extension that automatically scans web pages for accessibility issues and provides detailed reports with specific remediation guidance. It's built by accessibility experts and is widely considered the gold standard for automated accessibility testing, helping developers catch issues early in the development process.

Axure RP is a professional prototyping tool for creating highly interactive wireframes, flowcharts, and functional prototypes without code. Its conditional logic, dynamic content, and adaptive views make it especially powerful for complex enterprise UX documentation.

Balsamiq is a rapid wireframing tool with a deliberately sketch-style aesthetic that keeps conversations focused on structure rather than visual polish. Its drag-and-drop component library makes it the fastest way to go from idea to wireframe, loved by product teams and stakeholders alike.

Layered app-icon editor for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro with live Liquid Glass previews, Apple .icon import and export, PNG output, and built-in symbol libraries for production icon work.

Blender is a free, open-source 3D creation suite that covers the entire pipeline — modeling, sculpting, animation, VFX, compositing, and video editing. Backed by a massive community and regular updates, it's become a serious alternative to expensive commercial 3D software.

BlenderKit is an online asset library integrated directly into Blender, offering thousands of free and premium 3D models, materials, brushes, and HDRIs. Search and drag assets straight into your scene without leaving the application.

Figma plugin for scanning layouts and components for accessibility issues, documenting focus order and ARIA intent, and handing annotated guidance to developers before implementation.

Browser-based AI CAD tool that turns text or reference images into editable parametric models. Inspect geometry, adjust dimensions, refine parts in chat, and export STL or STEP files.

Desktop UI design tool for embedded and HMI products that turns visual layouts into editable QML. The free beta runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux and includes an AI assistant and MCP server.

macOS app for turning code snippets into shareable images, with syntax highlighting for 180+ languages, 80+ themes, and controls for type, padding, shadows, and social formats.

Color Hunt is a curated collection of beautiful color palettes updated daily by a community of designers. Browse by popularity, trending, or random — each palette is four colors you can copy with a click. Simple, fast, and endlessly browsable.

Color Review provides an intuitive visual interface for checking color contrast ratios between foreground and background colors. It shows real-time WCAG compliance ratings and offers an easy way to adjust colors until they meet accessibility standards, perfect for quick design decisions.

Color Safe is a web-based tool that generates accessible color palettes by ensuring all color combinations meet WCAG contrast requirements. It allows designers to input a base color and automatically suggests complementary colors that maintain proper contrast ratios for text and backgrounds.

Advanced palette builder from Lyft Design using perceptually uniform color scales (HSLuv/LCH). Creates accessible, predictable color systems for design systems — the tool behind thoughtful ramp generation.

Deep learning color palette generator that extracts schemes from photos, movies, and art. Lock starting colors and generate harmonious 5-color palettes with a single click.

Colour Contrast Checker is a straightforward web tool that evaluates color combinations against WCAG 2.1 guidelines for normal and large text. It provides clear pass/fail indicators for AA and AAA compliance levels, making it easy for designers to ensure their color choices meet accessibility requirements.

Contrast is a macOS menubar app that lets designers quickly check color contrast ratios against WCAG guidelines with a simple point-and-click interface. It provides instant feedback on whether color combinations meet AA or AAA accessibility standards, making it perfect for quick checks during design workflows.

Coolors is the fastest color palette generator — press spacebar to cycle through harmonious combinations, lock colors you like, and fine-tune with advanced adjustments. Export to multiple formats, check contrast ratios, and explore trending palettes from the community.

W3C overview of the September 2026 WCAG 3 draft, explaining core and supplemental requirements, policy tags, reporting tiers, and why conformance alone does not guarantee accessible outcomes.

Create unique crystal shapes perfect for AI products with one-click copy to Figma

Cursor added a visual editor, closing the code-to-design gap from the code side. For designer-builders, this may become the fastest path from idea to implementation — especially for SwiftUI and React prototypes.

DECALmachine is a Blender add-on for creating and applying decals — surface details like logos, panels, and worn edges — without complex UV mapping. It dramatically speeds up hard-surface modeling workflows by letting you project detail directly onto meshes.

Open-source page-layout and publishing app for macOS, Windows, Linux, and the web. It supports threaded text, styles, IDML and INDD import, PDF and EPUB export, and agent-driven editing.

Efecto is a browser-based interactive shader effects tool for designers and developers. Play with generative shaders like the Pulsar, experiment with parameters in real-time, and use the outputs as backgrounds, textures, or hero visuals for your projects.

Endless Tools is a collection of generative design tools for creating unique patterns, gradients, and abstract compositions. Each tool focuses on a specific creative technique — noise, grids, waves — letting designers produce one-of-a-kind visuals for backgrounds, posters, and branding.

Cursor is an AI-powered code editor built on VS Code that understands your codebase and helps you write, refactor, and debug code through natural language. For designers who code, it dramatically lowers the barrier to building prototypes and design tools.

DIA's Tools Archive is a curated collection of creative software, utilities, and experiments from the DIA design studio. It surfaces lesser-known tools alongside industry staples, helping designers discover new additions to their creative toolkit.

GitHub Action that scans sites and repositories for accessibility barriers, files trackable issues, and can assign findings to Copilot for proposed fixes with human review.

8 gradient modes, 20+ customizable variables, export up to 8000px. Free browser-based gradient generator with unlimited use.

HAS Paint Layers is a Blender add-on that brings a Photoshop-like layer system to texture painting. It lets you paint on separate layers with blend modes, masks, and non-destructive editing — essential for anyone doing texture work inside Blender.

html.to.design converts any website into fully editable Figma designs. Paste a URL, drop in HTML/CSS, or capture private/logged-in pages via the Chrome extension. Outputs real text, images, and proper layer hierarchy with auto layout — ideal for redesigns, competitive audits, and rapid prototyping without building from scratch.

Machine learning-powered palette generator with color locking, adjustable creativity, and real-time website/logo previews. One of the most sophisticated AI color tools — generates palettes that feel intentional rather than random.

Inclusive Components by Heydon Pickering provides detailed, practical examples of how to build common UI components with accessibility built-in from the start. Each post breaks down the design and development considerations needed to create truly inclusive interfaces, making complex accessibility concepts approachable and actionable.

AI color tool that learns your preferences after you rate 50 colors, then generates infinite personalized palettes. Views combinations as gradients, typography, images — highly underrated.

LDRS provides a collection of beautiful, lightweight loading animations as web components. Each loader is customizable via attributes (size, color, speed), zero-dependency, and works with any framework — perfect for adding polished loading states to any project.

Lighthouse is built directly into Chrome DevTools and provides comprehensive accessibility audits alongside performance and SEO analysis. It automatically scans pages for common accessibility issues and provides actionable recommendations, making it an essential tool that's always available to developers and designers.

Apple's iOS/macOS Liquid Glass effect recreated in pure CSS and SVG filters. Open-source implementation you can use in your web projects.

Loops is a modern email platform designed specifically for SaaS companies, offering transactional emails, marketing campaigns, and automated sequences with a clean, developer-friendly interface. Its visual email builder helps designers create branded communications without wrestling with HTML email quirks.

Browser-based Material 3 Expressive canvas for arranging responsive screens, linking tap and swipe flows, previewing interactions, and exporting a structured prompt for AI coding tools.

Marvel is an all-in-one design platform that covers wireframing, prototyping, user testing, and developer handoff in a browser-based tool. Its simplicity makes it great for quick prototypes and non-designer stakeholders who need to contribute to the design process.

Autodesk Maya is the industry-standard 3D software for modeling, animation, VFX, and rendering used in film, TV, and game production. Its deep toolset covers everything from character rigging to fluid simulations, with an extensive plugin ecosystem for specialized workflows.

Cinema 4D by Maxon is a professional 3D motion graphics, modeling, and rendering application known for its intuitive interface and tight integration with After Effects. It's a go-to tool for motion designers creating broadcast graphics, product visualizations, and abstract artwork.

AI-powered text-to-3D and image-to-3D generator that creates textured 3D models from prompts or photos. Fast ideation tool for motion graphics, UI mockups, and hero imagery.

Visual design canvas connected to a React codebase, using its components, tokens, live data, and responsive states. Teams can prototype against the product and hand engineering a scoped pull request.

Designers can now build modular AI workflows visually — nodes for prompts, data, and logic — without code. Creates inspectable, composable, auditable AI iteration. The 'pro mode' layer of AI-assisted design for systems thinkers who value intent-driven constraints over black-box automation.

Nomad Sculpt is a powerful 3D sculpting app for iPad and Android tablets that rivals desktop tools in capability. With multiresolution sculpting, PBR painting, and an intuitive touch interface, it lets artists create detailed 3D models anywhere.

Modern color picker using the OKLCH color space for perceptually uniform palettes. Prevents the harsh jumps in lightness that plague HSL — essential for anyone building systematic color scales.

Origami Studio is Meta's free design prototyping tool used internally for products like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Its patch-based visual programming system excels at creating complex, realistic interaction prototypes — especially micro-interactions and gesture-driven interfaces.

Pa11y is a command-line tool and web service that runs automated accessibility tests on web pages using HTML CodeSniffer rules. It can be integrated into development workflows and CI/CD pipelines to catch accessibility issues early, providing detailed reports and the ability to test multiple pages at scale.

Paletton is an advanced color scheme designer that uses color wheel relationships to generate harmonious palettes. Its visual approach lets you see how colors interact in real-time, with presets for adjacent, triad, and tetrad schemes — particularly strong for web design color systems.

Vector design canvas for desktop apps and IDEs that stores open .pen files in the repo, imports Figma work, and supports bidirectional design and code changes through local MCP tools.

Free, open-source desktop tool for wireframes, flowcharts, and clickable interface mockups. Version 4 adds an MCP server so coding agents can create, arrange, edit, and inspect canvas objects.

Open-source interface design and prototyping platform with CSS Grid and Flex layouts, design tokens, shared libraries, and an open file format. Teams can use its cloud service or self-host.

Native Mac utility for batch-converting and compressing images, video, audio, RAW files, and PDFs locally. Includes presets, watched folders, clipboard optimization, and Finder actions.

Pigment by ShapeFactory generates beautiful color palettes using pigment-mixing algorithms instead of traditional math-based approaches, resulting in more natural, organic color combinations. Adjust hue and lightness with simple sliders for instant palette exploration.

Pixel Composer is a node-based VFX tool designed specifically for pixel art, letting you create complex particle effects, distortions, and animations through visual scripting. It brings procedural motion graphics techniques to the pixel art world.

Free CC0-licensed PBR textures (8K+), HDRIs (16K+), and 3D models — all photoscanned for realistic quality. No attribution required, fully free for commercial use.

Free WCAG 2.2 audit suite with browser extensions, a bookmarklet, CLI, and open-source engine. Findings include exact elements and fixes, while uncertain criteria stay in a manual-review checklist.

Primer Prism, created by GitHub's design team, helps you build cohesive and accessible color systems from a single base color. It generates consistent color scales with built-in WCAG contrast checking — essential for design system color token creation.

A procedural fur and hair shader for Blender that generates realistic animal fur, hair, and fiber effects using nodes — no particle systems required. Perfect for stylized or photorealistic renders where you need quick, customizable hair and fur textures.

Browser-based review space for HTML, Markdown, images, and PDFs. Reviewers add pinned notes without an account, while versions keep feedback attached to the exact page and state.

Generates accessible color combinations that meet WCAG contrast requirements. Instant random pairings with AA/AAA compliance indicators — useful for quickly finding accessible text/background combos.

React Grab is an interactive demo and component library showcasing advanced React interactions and animations. Praised for some of the most polished interactive demos in the React ecosystem — great for inspiration and copying proven interaction patterns.

Visualizes color palettes on actual website mockups in real-time. Select neutrals, primary, secondary, accent colors and instantly see how they feel together — exports as CSS, SCSS, or PNG.

Web-based color-system builder that starts from an image or single color, generates Oklch scales, checks contrast, and exports palettes to Figma variables, CSS, SCSS, or PDF.

uMake is a 3D design tool that lets you sketch ideas in 3D space using natural gestures on iPad or desktop. Aimed at industrial and product designers, it bridges the gap between 2D sketching and full 3D modeling with an approachable, creative workflow.

Cults is a marketplace for downloading free and premium 3D printer models across categories like art, fashion, jewelry, and architecture. Designers can browse thousands of ready-to-print STL files or sell their own creations to a global community.

Shapr3D is a precision CAD modeling tool designed for iPad, Mac, and Windows that makes professional 3D modeling accessible through an intuitive interface. It's ideal for product designers and engineers who need to create accurate mechanical parts, enclosures, and prototypes.

Setapp is a subscription service that gives you access to 240+ curated Mac and iOS apps for a flat monthly fee — including design tools like CleanShot X, Sip, and Gifox. A cost-effective way to access premium productivity and design utilities without individual licenses.

Component-based WebGPU shaders for React, Vue, and Svelte. Visual editor generates production-ready shader code for landing pages, dashboards, and hero sections.

Shots lets you create beautiful device mockups and presentation frames in seconds — just drop in your screenshot, pick a device template, customize the background, and export. No Photoshop needed. Essential for portfolio presentations and social media marketing.

Experimental pattern generator for branding work. Custom shapes and images analyzed by pixel brightness for unique flow patterns. Built with creative coding principles.

Web-based 3D design tool for creating interactive scenes with real-time collaboration and AI assistance. Embeds 3D directly into websites — lowers the barrier to adding 3D to product UIs significantly.

Stark is a comprehensive accessibility suite that integrates with design tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD to help designers check contrast, simulate vision conditions, and ensure accessible color choices. It provides real-time accessibility feedback during the design process, making it easier to catch and fix issues before they reach development.

Professional color palette generator rebuilt for the web. More powerful and accessible version of the popular Figma plugin.

Advanced palette builder with manual hue/saturation sliders supporting OKHSL/LCH color spaces, image import, contrast checks, and exports up to 24 colors. For designers who want precise control over perceptual uniformity.

Superdesign.dev offers a collection of AI-powered design tools for quick tasks like background removal, image upscaling, and design asset generation. A Swiss army knife for designers.

SuperX Chrome extension for X (Twitter) analytics. Track follower growth, engagement metrics, and post performance. Free analytics dashboard for creators.

A specialized color generator that creates complete Tailwind CSS color scales from a single color input. It produces 50-950 shade ranges that match Tailwind's naming convention, ready to paste into your tailwind.config.js for custom brand colors.

Free desktop 3D studio that turns photos, prompts, or sketches into models with local open-source generators. Its node editor chains cleanup, remeshing, optimization, rigging, and export.

Curated directory of the best AI tools for UI/UX designers — from conversational design tools to sketch-to-digital converters. Tracks the shift from pixel-pushing to intent-driven design iteration.

Adobe Color is a free web tool for creating, exploring, and saving color palettes using color theory rules like complementary, analogous, and triadic harmony. It integrates directly with Creative Cloud apps and lets you extract palettes from uploaded images.

UNMS Research is an AI-powered app for academic and market research. It gathers sources and helps you analyze them, with a free tier to start.

UXPin is a design tool that bridges the gap between design and code by letting you build prototypes with real React, Storybook, or npm components. Its merge technology means designers work with production components directly, eliminating design-development drift.

3D and AR design tool for product visuals and web 3D with drag-and-drop interface and real-time rendering. Good for non-3D designers who need compelling product shots.

Local-first visual thinking canvas for Apple Silicon Macs, with pressure-sensitive drawing, layers, shapes, text, images, and PSD exchange. Built for rough notes, diagrams, and wireframes.

WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) provides visual feedback about the accessibility of your web content by injecting icons and indicators into your page. It helps identify accessibility errors, alerts, and structural elements, making it easy to see exactly where issues exist and understand their impact on users.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Quick Reference is the official, authoritative source for web accessibility standards and requirements. It provides a filterable, searchable interface to explore all accessibility guidelines, success criteria, and techniques, making it the definitive resource for understanding what makes content accessible.

Browser-based WCAG audit tool with 46 checks split across content, design, and development. Runs locally on pages behind logins or on localhost, with 28 checks available free and optional report export.

WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) is a comprehensive educational resource providing in-depth articles, tutorials, and training materials on web accessibility. It offers both technical guidance and conceptual understanding of accessibility principles, making it an invaluable resource for anyone looking to build more inclusive digital experiences.

Who Can Use shows how color contrast affects people with different types of vision, including various forms of color blindness and low vision conditions. It provides a powerful visual demonstration of why accessibility matters by showing exactly who can and cannot perceive your color choices clearly.

Browser-native 3D modeling with an intuitive sculpting approach. Exports to Figma/Illustrator for UI mockups, supports PBR materials and 4K renders — no 3D experience required.

Womp is a beginner-friendly 3D design tool that runs entirely in the browser. Using an intuitive clay-like modeling approach, it lets anyone create 3D illustrations, icons, and scenes without the steep learning curve of traditional 3D software.