Best new design, open-source and AI video resources: 23 October

The directory additions from 23 October were thirty free tools and websites, ten open-source projects from GitHub and one paid AI video platform. This roundup groups them into design and media, finding tools and alternatives, web and developer utilities, meetings, planning and reading together, learning and research, open-source projects, and AI video. Features and pricing change, so check each tool's own page before you commit to one.

Design and media

Blush offers illustration collections by artists worldwide that you can customise by changing poses, colours, backgrounds and accessories. The free plan gives unlimited PNG downloads with no attribution required, while SVG files, print-resolution images and some collections need a paid plan. Logoipsum is a free collection of more than 200 fictional placeholder logos to download as SVG or PNG for mockups and presentations, and Wordmark shows a word or brand name in every font installed on your device, so you can compare typefaces side by side.

StockSnap is a library of high-resolution stock photos released under the CC0 licence, free for personal and commercial use without attribution, though some results are sponsored links to paid sites. Namelix uses AI to suggest short, brandable names from a few keywords and shows domain ideas alongside each one; suggested domains may already be taken. Httpster is a hand-curated showcase of well-designed websites sorted by type, style and colour, and Codrops has published free tutorials and demos on animation, WebGL, CSS and layout since 2009, many of which assume some coding experience.

Kapwing is a browser-based video editor for trimming, subtitles, resizing for social platforms and screen recording. The free plan exports videos up to four minutes at 720p with a watermark. Clipdrop brings AI image tools such as background removal, upscaling, cleanup and relighting into one web app, with about 20 free uses a day for most tools and high-resolution results on Pro.

Finding tools and alternatives

Tiny Helpers collects more than 700 free single-purpose web tools for developers and designers, grouped by tags such as colour, fonts and SVG; the linked tools vary in upkeep. opensource.builders lists open-source alternatives to well-known proprietary apps and shows which features they share with the original, and switching.software is a community-run list of ethical, privacy-conscious alternatives to products from large tech companies. F-Droid is a catalogue of free and open-source Android apps built from source, with listings that flag anti-features such as tracking or ads. It is Android only, and updates can arrive later than on Google Play.

Web and developer utilities

urlscan.io visits a URL in a safe environment and reports the domains, scripts, redirects and screenshots behind the page, along with any phishing or malware verdicts. Free scans can be public, so avoid submitting private links. Mockaroo creates realistic fake data from more than 150 field types, with up to 1,000 rows per file on the free plan, and RANDOM.ORG generates random numbers from atmospheric noise, with free number, list and password tools and paid certified draws.

Shields.io serves free, open-source badges for build status, versions, downloads and licences, and readme.so is a simple editor with ready-made README sections and a live Markdown preview. Choose a License, maintained by GitHub, explains common open-source licences in plain language; it is not a substitute for legal advice. dbdiagram.io turns a short schema language called DBML into entity relationship diagrams, with up to 10 diagrams on the free plan, and ASCIIFlow is a free, open-source editor for drawing boxes and arrows as plain text that you can paste into code comments and messages.

Meetings, planning and reading together

Mentimeter runs live polls, quizzes, word clouds and Q&A that audiences answer from their phones, and the free plan is capped at 50 participants a month. MindMeister is an online mind mapping app with real-time collaboration, limited to three mind maps on the free plan. Hypothesis is an open-source tool for highlighting and commenting on web pages and PDFs through a browser extension, free for personal use and group annotation. Framadate, run by the French non-profit Framasoft, lets people vote on dates or options from a shared link without creating an account, though it has no calendar integration.

Sejda offers more than 30 PDF tools for editing, merging, splitting, compressing, signing and converting. The free web version handles documents up to 200 pages with three tasks per hour, files are deleted after two hours, and paid passes remove the limits.

Learning and research

JavaScript.info is a free, in-depth tutorial covering the JavaScript language, the browser and the DOM, with tasks after each chapter. Full Stack Open is a free course from the University of Helsinki that teaches React, Node.js, MongoDB, GraphQL, TypeScript and testing, and it needs basic programming knowledge and a real time commitment. OneLook searches over a thousand online dictionaries at once and includes a reverse dictionary for finding a word from a description. MyBib generates citations in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard and many other styles from a link, ISBN or DOI, with no ads or trackers, but you should always check citations before submitting.

Open-source projects

Ollama is a free app for downloading and running open language models such as Llama, Gemma, Qwen and Mistral on your own computer, keeping your data on your machine; larger models need a powerful computer. MarkItDown, from Microsoft, converts PDFs, Office files, HTML, images and audio into Markdown, and Docling turns documents into clean Markdown or JSON while understanding layout, tables and formulas. Both run locally and need some comfort with the command line or Python.

Miniflux is a minimal, distraction-free feed reader for RSS, Atom and JSON feeds, and Readest is an ebook reader for EPUB, MOBI and PDF with highlights, text-to-speech and sync across devices; it does not open DRM-protected books. BookStack is a self-hosted wiki that organises documentation into shelves, books, chapters and pages, and Huly brings issue tracking, planning, chat, documents and video meetings into one app you can host yourself, though self-hosting it is fairly heavy.

OpenWhispr is a dictation app that turns your voice into text in any app with a hotkey, using local speech models or your own API key for cloud models. Wakapi is a self-hosted backend for tracking time spent coding that works with the existing WakaTime editor plugins. Appsmith is a low-code platform for building internal tools such as admin panels and dashboards; some advanced features are in paid plans, and complex apps still need coding skills.

AI video

Higgsfield is an AI platform for making videos and images from text or a single photo. It puts many generation models in one place, adds camera-motion presets, and has tools for product ads and consistent characters. It is a paid service: the free plan has no credits, and credits can run out quickly on high-quality video, so check the plans before you start.

These forty-one additions sit alongside everything else in the directory. Browse the full Best Productivity Resources directory to compare them with other tools in each category.