8 tools
Locale
joshpuckett.me/locale
Preview your locally installed fonts in the browser — with adjustable size, weight, sample text, and background options.
Pinwheel
bjango.com/mac/pinwheel
Pinwheel is a $25 Mac app from Bjango (makers of iStat Menus) for managing color design systems: generate palettes and gradients, test WCAG 2 and APCA contrast on the fly, and export color tokens to Figma, SCSS, Design Tokens JSON, SwiftUI, or asset catalogs simultaneously. It imports from Figma and Sketch documents and can serve as the authoritative source of truth for a design system's color layer. Requires macOS 15+.
Cavalry
cavalry.scenegroup.co
Cavalry is a procedural 2D animation tool built by former Mainframe studio veterans in Manchester. Instead of keyframing everything manually, you connect nodes to define repeating behaviors — making it ideal for data-driven motion, generative art, and complex animation at scale. Used by Apple, Canva, Google, Nike, and Buck; the free Starter tier is permanent.
Wiretext
wiretext.app
Wiretext is a browser-based wireframing tool where everything renders as Unicode box-drawing characters — you get a spatial canvas with 30+ pre-built components (buttons, modals, tables, navbars, calendars) and export as plain text, Markdown, or shareable compressed URL links. The output is a text file you can paste into a PR, README, or spec doc without any image dependencies. Open source on GitHub.
Photopea
www.photopea.com
Photopea is a browser-based photo and graphics editor built by a solo developer whose UI matches Photoshop closely enough that Adobe users can start immediately. It handles PSD, AI, PDF, SVG, and CDR formats, stores files locally rather than uploading them, and works offline after the initial load. Free with ads; $9/month removes ads and adds AI credits. No installation, no subscription required for core use.
Womp
www.womp.com
Womp is a beginner-friendly browser-based 3D modeler built around 'Goop' — a liquid modeling system where objects blend organically as you push and pull primitives together. It renders at 4K with PBR materials, supports real-time collaboration, and connects directly to a 3D printing service for physical output. Compared to Spline (which targets web embedding), Womp skews toward art-making and fabrication.
Gimp
www.gimp.org
GIMP is the leading free, open-source image editor — the practical alternative to Photoshop for anyone unwilling to pay subscription fees. Version 3.0 (released February 2025 after seven years) added non-destructive layer effects, multi-layer selection, improved CMYK support, and native Wayland support. The plugin ecosystem is large but some older plugins broke in the Python 2 to Python 3 migration.
Inkscape
inkscape.org
Inkscape is a free, open-source vector graphics editor that uses SVG as its native file format — not an export option, but the actual working file — making it the only major vector tool whose output is web-standard code. Its feature set now genuinely rivals Illustrator: bezier tools, boolean operations, bitmap tracing via Potrace, a Shape Builder tool (added in v1.3), and advanced typography. No subscription, no AI upsell, no file hostage-taking.