Best new design, typography and learning resources: 21 October

The directory additions from 21 October were thirty free tools and websites and ten open-source projects from GitHub. This roundup groups them into icons, backgrounds and colour, typography, inspiration, images and sound, learning, reading and research, privacy, and open-source tools. Features and pricing change, so check each tool's own page before you commit to one.

Icons, backgrounds and colour

Feather Icons is a free, open-source set of simple line icons drawn on a 24 by 24 grid, where you can adjust size, stroke width and colour before copying the SVG or installing the set through npm. Bootstrap Icons, from the Bootstrap team, offers more than 2,000 free SVG icons that work with or without Bootstrap, as single SVGs, an icon font or an npm package. Lordicon is a library of animated icons you can export as Lottie, GIF, SVG or video; a free selection is available with attribution, while most of the library needs a paid plan.

BGJar generates SVG backgrounds such as waves, blobs, stripes and rings in the browser, with no sign-up. CSS Gradient builds linear and radial gradients with as many colour stops as you like and gives you the CSS, and Neumorphism.io produces the CSS for soft, raised and pressed UI shadows; neumorphic designs can have weak contrast, so check that text stays readable. Paletton, formerly Color Scheme Designer, builds palettes around a colour wheel, previews them on sample pages and can simulate colour blindness.

Typography

Typewolf shows fonts used on real websites, with pairing ideas, trend lists and free font recommendations; browsing is free, while its guides and courses are sold separately. Fonts In Use is a free, searchable archive of typographic design that names the typefaces behind book covers, posters, branding and websites, though it does not host downloads and many featured fonts are commercial. FontPair suggests more than 1,000 curated pairings made from Google Fonts, which you can preview with your own text.

Velvetyne is a French type foundry that publishes libre, mostly display fonts under the SIL Open Font License. Fontsource packages open-source and variable fonts, including the Google Fonts library, for self-hosting, so you can install a font through npm and avoid third-party font requests.

Inspiration, images and sound

Muzli gathers design inspiration and design news into one feed, on its website or as a browser extension for every new tab; some of its content is sponsored. Old Book Illustrations collects scans from 19th and early 20th century books, most of them in the public domain, and it is worth checking each image's rights note before you reuse it. Freesound is a collaborative database of more than 700,000 sound effects, samples and field recordings under Creative Commons licences, run by the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra; downloads need a free account and some sounds require attribution.

Learning

MDN Web Docs is Mozilla's free documentation for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, web APIs and HTTP, with learning paths, browser compatibility tables and runnable examples. roadmap.sh lays out what to learn for roles such as front-end, back-end, DevOps and AI engineering, and lets you mark topics as done; some AI features need a paid plan. Free Stuff Dev is a directory of developer tools and services with free plans, though free plan details can go out of date.

edX hosts courses from universities such as Harvard, MIT and Berkeley, and many can be audited for free, while certificates, degrees and some programmes are paid. Duolingo teaches more than 40 languages through short lessons, plus maths and music; the free version has ads and a limit on mistakes. GeoGebra is a free suite of maths apps for graphing, geometry, algebra, 3D, statistics and calculus, and Wolfram|Alpha calculates answers in maths, science, units and more, with step-by-step solutions on its Pro plan.

Reading and research

LibriVox is a non-profit project where volunteers record public domain books as free audiobooks you can stream or download without an account, with recording quality that varies by reader. Feedly is an RSS reader whose free plan follows up to 100 sources in three folders, while paid plans add newsletters, search and AI features.

For papers, arXiv is a free, open-access archive run by Cornell University for physics, mathematics, computer science, statistics and related fields; papers there are not always peer reviewed. Semantic Scholar, from the Allen Institute for AI, adds one-line TLDR summaries, citation graphs and paper alerts, and Google Scholar searches articles, theses, books and court opinions with citation counts, although many results sit behind paywalls.

Privacy

Firefox Relay from Mozilla creates email masks that forward to your real inbox; the free plan includes up to five masks, and replies and phone masks need Relay Premium. SimpleLogin, an open-source alias service that is now part of Proton, offers 10 free aliases that can also send replies, with unlimited aliases and custom domains on its paid plan. Because these services sit between you and your accounts, keep a note of which alias you used where. Privacy Badger, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a free, open-source extension that learns to block invisible trackers and sends Global Privacy Control signals; it is not a full ad blocker and can occasionally break site features.

Open-source tools from GitHub

rclone copies, syncs and moves files between your computer and more than 70 cloud storage services, can mount cloud storage as a drive and can encrypt backups before they leave your machine; as with any sync tool, try a new setup on a copy of your files first. Kimai is a self-hosted time tracker for freelancers and teams that turns timesheets into reports, exports and invoices, and, like any self-hosted app, it needs a server of your own.

In the terminal, jrnl keeps a quick plain-text journal that you can encrypt with a password, Taskwarrior manages tasks with projects, tags, due dates and an urgency score, and zoxide remembers the folders you visit so you can jump to them with a few letters. On macOS, Ice hides and reorders menu bar icons, and Karabiner-Elements remaps keys, such as turning Caps Lock into Escape or a hyper key; both are macOS only.

Xournal++ is an app for handwritten notes, sketches and PDF annotation with pressure sensitivity and LaTeX formulas, though it has no mobile app or cloud sync. JabRef is a reference manager built around BibTeX and BibLaTeX that fetches details by DOI, ISBN or arXiv ID and cites into LaTeX, Word or LibreOffice. Bruno is an API client for REST, GraphQL and gRPC requests that stores collections as plain text files you can version with Git, with no account or cloud sync required.

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