🎨 A designer's 9 favorite tools
Wonder Tools for the creative process
Last week I wrote about Why Gamma is great 🏆 for presentations. Today, discover nine new and lesser-known tools in a guest post by indie designer and writer
. He works on startups and publishes about design ideas. I discovered Itay whenI stumbled upon Schrodi, his colorful service for creating personalized children’s stories. Read on below for his toolkit for getting work done.Itay: I spend much of my time researching. I call myself a generalist with a rabbit hole disorder. The tools I use sometimes overlap, but I like using products designed for a single purpose.
Organizing the web
Even when I’m not in active working mode, I’m curating stuff I find appealing. An interesting essay, a cool website, or a random image can all be useful for a future project.
Are.na for saving visual bookmarks
I think of my Are.na as a digital garden—it’s my primary tool for saving references for work and personal purposes. I feed it with images, links, and other noteworthy stuff. Using the extension makes it easy to save discoveries without distraction.
As a designer, seeking inspiration is a lifelong pursuit. When kickstarting a new project, it’s easy to get lost in design galleries, looking at tons of references. Instead of endless research, I use Are.na to maintain an ongoing inspiration repository. For example, I curate my favorite interface design and branding examples to revisit when a relevant project comes in.
URList for organizing links in shareable lists
Over the years I found myself creating tons of random lists. I once even hacked Notion to research the history of Anchor and social audio.
That’s why I built URList with a friend. Instead of creating isolated, oft-forgotten lists in a note-taking tool, URList is designed for saving *only* links in dedicated lists.
As a personal project, we built it to fit our workflow. When making lists, I organize links into sections and provide contextual side notes as needed, which I can then share.
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Quotebacks for saving text highlights
To save highlights from around the web, some people use their note-taking system. Or X/Twitter to quote favorite tweets. I find Quotebacks to be a great alternative for curating a private text library.
Quotebacks is a free browser extension that makes it easy to quote text from any website. I like using it when researching for a new piece I’m writing. The extension saves text to an organized private, local library. I can later revisit potentially useful quotes.
Don’t expect an extensive feature set. The tool was built as a side project by indies Tom and Toby. It’s simple yet effective. You can use its export feature to share quotes as a cool image, like this:
Searching the web
Google’s SEO content quantity over quality approach makes it a burden to find useful resources on the web. To overcome that, I’ve shifted to alternative search engines. To find non-mainstream stuff, you have to use non-mainstream tools:
Twemex for searching over X (Twitter)
X (Twitter) is a giant information hub. I find many interesting discussions and cool under-the-radar stuff. But searching the former-bird platform is cumbersome.
Twemex is a browser extension that leverages Twitter’s advanced search mode. It’s built around the idea of Memexing Twitter while turning the platform into a personal search engine. I use Twemex heavily as part of my research workflow, especially when diving deep into multiple rabbit holes.
It replaces Twitter’s right sidebar (which is pretty much useless) and works in a slash-command style. You can search for content from people you follow or specific profiles. Here’s a screenshot.
Exa for meaningful search results
I prefer authentic, non-mainstream content. The internet is filled with endless tiny corners yet to be discovered. Exa (formerly Metaphor) is the right tool for this task.
Unlike Google, Exa doesn’t prioritize the best “SEO websites” but instead the most meaningful ones. I often prefer quoting niche blog posts for diverse perspectives over mainstream sites. Exa excels at finding those.
Exa transforms questions you ask into language it expects to find in answers. For example, a search query like “What are the best text editors for writing online?” gets transformed into “These are the best text editors for writing online.”
Exa offers a feature called Autoprompting that converts any given query into an optimized Exa-query. Here’s a screenshot.
Marginalia for uncommercialized search results
Marginalia is another search engine alternative, developed by an indie Swedish developer, which is another reason to like it.
Marginalia indexes only non-commercial websites, so expect small, niche site results that wouldn’t land on Google’s first page. To make the most of it use specific, niche keywords.
Oh, and Marginalia should also be cherished for its beautiful ugly design.
Writing on the web
I’m still looking for the best text editor to fit my writing style. Meanwhile, I’ve found a good balance in taking notes to build up my writing ideas while using plugins to assist me as I write.
Roam Research for sketching writing ideas
I don’t use Roam as a personal second brain. I’ve long given up on the idea of digitizing my brain and rigorously recording thoughts. [JC note: Why I used Roam as a creative notes tool]
However, I do lean on Roam to develop my writing ideas. In fact, most of my posts start as messy Roam documents.
I like to think of thoughts as floating bubbles. 🫧A thought spontaneously comes to mind and might fade away shortly after. This aligns nicely with Roam’s bullet-point layout. Transforming rough thoughts into bullet points makes riffing easier. I type as I think and connect thoughts with existing or new ideas.
Wordtune and Grammarly for spell-checking and editing
I’m not that bullish (yet) on AI, but I do find it useful as a writing assistant.
As a non-native English speaker, tools like Wordtune and Grammarly reduce my time spent spell-checking and fixing typos.
Grammarly: I tend to turn it off when I write so the colorized underlines don’t distract me. When I’m ready to review a draft, I turn it on to let it work its magic.
Wordtune: I like to use it for rephrasing and rewriting specific lines. I prefer it over other AI-based writing tools. It’s best at preserving my original wording and not making me sound too AI-like.
You can reach Itay via his personal site. Read his writings on Product Identity. Here’s a picture of him at work on his newest project: providing deep thinking as a service, helping people explore key questions and issues.
Great tips, thanks for the post!
Wow. Some true little gems in this one.
Thank you Jeremy!
I particularly appreciated the mentions of Arena / Quotestack / URList and was positively surprised by Exa and Marginalia Search.