The design toolkit

Twenty-six sites and tools we actually open: for inspiration, fonts, music, motion, 3D and AI. Checked live, no affiliate links. The full list is below, grouped the way we use it.

Stuck on a layout? The answer is already live somewhere. These are where to look.

The awards site for web design. Site of the Day is a free daily lesson in what the best studios are shipping.

Best for: seeing where the bar is this month.

A fast, endless wall of the newest well-designed sites. Formerly Godly. No articles, just the work.

Best for: a ten-minute scroll before you start.

Hand-picked sites where less is doing more. Great when a client says clean and means it.

Best for: type-led, quiet layouts.

A long-running gallery of sites with personality. Filter by type and style.

Best for: portfolios and studio sites.

A deep archive you can filter by style, type and subject. Old enough to show what ages well.

Best for: finding a reference in a niche.

Landing pages, product pages and shops, sorted and searchable.

Best for: anything that has to convert.

Two tiny galleries for the two parts of a site everyone rushes. One for navigation, one for footers.

Best for: the last 10% of a build.

Most AI tools are a demo. These six are in real workflows. One warning at the end.

Drop in a product photo and build a studio scene around it. Made for e-commerce images.

Use it for: quick product scenes and mock shoots.

3D design in the browser with real-time collaboration. Model, animate and embed it on a site.

Use it for: 3D hero sections without Blender.

Predicts where eyes land on an ad or layout before you spend money running it.

Use it for: testing a key visual before launch.

Image generation that also outputs vectors, custom styles and mockups.

Use it for: icons and illustrations in one style.

Sitemaps and wireframes for marketing sites, generated from a prompt and editable.

Use it for: the first hour of a web project.

AI website building, hosting and optimisation on WordPress.

Use it for: a fast first version for a small business.

None of these pick the idea, the palette or the typeface for you. They make a designer faster. They do not make one.

Tools multiply taste. Zero times anything is zero.

Seven free places that fix the usual problems: fonts, music, heroes, motion and references.

A curated shelf of free typefaces that do not look free, sorted for branding, web and editorial.

Fixes: the default-font look.

A hand-picked library of website hero sections. Nothing else, just the first screen.

Fixes: a weak first impression.

A calm place to collect references. Like a moodboard app with no ads and no noise.

Fixes: references lost in screenshots.

Visual references chosen by designers. Collect what matters and train your eye.

Fixes: not knowing what good looks like.

Motion design in the browser. Animate a layout in minutes with no After Effects.

Fixes: static posts in a moving feed.

Music for creators with a free tier. Tracks that will not get your reel muted.

Fixes: copyright strikes.

Hundreds of thousands of real app and web screens, searchable by flow and pattern.

Fixes: guessing how an interface should work.

• awwwards.com: award-winning sites, daily
• recent.design: newest well-designed sites
• minimal.gallery: minimal, type-led sites
• httpster.net: sites with personality
• siteinspire.com: archive, filter by style
• land-book.com: landing and product pages

• supahero.io: hero sections only
• navbar.gallery: navigation patterns
• footer.design: footers
• mobbin.com: real app and web flows

• cosmos.so: collect inspiration, no ads
• savee.it: references picked by designers

• bestfreefonts.com: curated free typefaces
• uppbeat.io: music for creators, free tier

• jitter.video: motion design in the browser
• rive.app: interactive vector animation
• spline.design: 3D in the browser
• gsap.com: web animation engine
• lenis.darkroom.engineering: smooth scroll
• threejs.org: WebGL 3D

• flair.ai: product scenes from a photo
• recraft.ai: images and vectors in one style
• relume.io: sitemaps and wireframes
• neuronsinc.com: predict attention on a layout
• 10web.io: AI site builder on WordPress
• skills.sh: free skills for Claude