14 recent useful design resources in January 2021

What's in today's release: various generators, cool sources for your inspiration, stylish icons, top 2020 products from Product Hunt, tools for exporting animations and GIFs, and much more.

As usual, the hottest resources are at the end, so make sure you don't miss the most interesting items!

With that being said, on we go!

Vektors is the illustrations aggregator. All illustrations of this resource are free (but some collections have user licenses).

At Vektors, you'll find illustrations from artists around the world and for a wide variety of projects. Illustrations are available in PNG, SVG, Figma, Sketch formats.

At the moment there are 70+ packs.

This browser-based pattern generator allows you to create unique royalty-free textures.

Pattern Generator has flexible settings: after choosing a base style, you can then customize your texture using colors, filters and transformations. Each pattern style has its own unique transformations. The Shuffle button acts like a Random button shuffling the styles and outputting randomized items.

You can export the file not only to JPEG or PNG, but also as code for inline SVG and CSS background images.

Gumaffiliates is a new resource that allows you to do affiliate marketing through Gumroad.

Ideal for both creatives without an audience and affiliate marketers with an audience, but without their own products.

By purchasing a product (Gumaffiliates costs $1):

1) Creatives receive a table of people with an audience;

2) Affiliate marketers receive a table with products to promote.

The tables include the following data: product name (for affiliate marketers it's an audience name), niches, website and contact information.

Parametric Color Mixer allows you to generate colors and then customize the palette using interactive equalizers.

Once you have chosen the color, you can adjust it using the following parameters: Position, Impact, Range, Blend.

The number of colors can be either added or reduced.

Exports to SVG and CSS.

This website has been created specifically for game UI designers.

On this resource, you will find an extensive database of various elements: from pop-up menus to HUD elements. A treasure trove of information for game UI designers.

Nearly 13,000 screenshots from 355 games. More than 80 types of screens.

Game UI Database has a very convenient search system. The sidebar displays filters for screen types: title menus, game states, statistics, information, online features, gameplay and HUD.

You can also filter by genre, theme, camera, game aesthetic, device / controls, etc.

GIFRun allows you to create GIFs without watermarks from different social networks like YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Vimeo, Twitter and many others that have an embedded video function.

Just insert the source link, define the duration and start time, add text (optional) and your GIF is ready.

If you are an artist or illustrator then try Doodle Strudel. This task generator by Pablo Stanley is a great thing for those who have an idea crisis.

Only here you will find such crazy tasks as: "Draw a witty horse with big headphones, which reads a book on the street".

Scale is a great website with beautiful illustrations that are suitable for both the app or website design, as well as for various promo materials or presentations.

The desired illustration can be found in the search bar, or filtered by gender, and when adjusting it, you can select the color scheme in the HEX code field.

Illustrations are available in SVG and PNG formats.

The resource is completely new, but the collection of spectacular illustrations already has more than 120 items.

The authors guarantee to upload something new every day.

The UX Resource We Deserve.

In this powerful and new database, you will find curated products for all occasions: the best tools, plugins, methodologies, learning resources and more.

You can sort it by the following categories: research, analysis, visual design, interface design, next-generation products (AR / VR, chatbots, etc.), productivity, learning, multimedia.

And what's also great about it - each resource is marked with availability: paid, free, or with a Freemium license.

Pattern Collect is a kind of Dribbble for artists creating patterns and textures.

With this gallery, not only you can get inspiration and improve your skills, but also upload your work there and refresh your portfolio.

The resource contains templates in 45 categories, including abstraction, faces, geometric shapes, paints, retro, and much more.

Flow is a new player in the motion design market. The tool's arsenal includes:

· Import from Figma, Sketch, XD, Illustrator, Affinity, etc. files (creators promise to add support for Instagram and Dribbble in the future);

· A wide range of different functions for cool animation;

· Direct export of your Sketch / Figma animations to clean code for Swift, React, SVG, and more.

Animations for onboarding screens, buttons, advertising content, and promo videos - Flow will be a great helper in adding some spice to your product.

Plus, the Flow's interface is super intuitive. It incorporates the best practices of the interface from design tools of recent years. Therefore, if you know how to work with Figma or Sketch, then you will quickly figure out how to work with Flow.

Byte Dance Icons is a cool collection of icons from the Figma community containing

almost 3000 elements for a wide variety of projects. Icons are available in outlined, filled and two-tone styles.

For using icons in code, here is the documentation for Vue and React.

The collection is constantly updated.

One enthusiast compiled a table of the best products on Product Hunt for 2020 in Notion. Here you will find a collection of over 360 products.

In the viewing settings, you can choose the most convenient type of content viewing: gallery view, board view, or table view. The table contains all the necessary information for each product: project name, launch date on ProductHunt, number of upvotes, and link to an image.

1st place is occupied by the article "The State of Design Systems: 2020". This is a very informative material where Google has done a research on the use of design systems in 2020. For this study, Google surveyed over 1,000 designers.

Here are the main results.

According to 83% of those surveyed, UI kits are one of the main artifacts of the design system. Which once again confirms the effectiveness of its use.

Figma is a leader in the following spheres:

1) Top tools for designing the digital products;

2) Top tools for design documentation and hand-off;

3) Top tools for managing design systems.

Material Design is a leader in the segment of used design systems. Next up are Apple's Human-Interface Guidelines and Bootstrap (unexpected!).

More and more companies create their own design systems. 80% of respondents reported that they have created their own design systems in-house. The main reason is that its own design system better matches the company's brand.

That's it for today. Thank you for your attention.

We hope you liked the content and can't wait for you to start creating something awesome with these resources.

We constantly publish interesting news from the world of the design industry. So to stay informed and to get some inspiration, consider subscribing to our Newsletter, as well as our Youtube channel and follow our pages on: Dribbble, Behance, Medium, Reddit.

Also, don't forget to visit our Setproduct homepage to get inspired with UI design from the nearest future. Where you will find top-notch design systems and UI kits for fast and high-quality work in Figma.

Happy creating something useful!