More good stuff / July 2016

A must-read for Photoshop users Photoshop Etiquette is a guide to creating Photoshop files that won't make other designers or developers on your team want to murder you. It talks about everything from handling layers to typography best practices to responsible use of effects, and everything in between. If you share Photoshop files with others, it's a must-read.

See your street, after Independence Day Independence Day My Street is a promotional website for the Independence Day Resurgence film. Enter your address (or any street address, really) to see the desctruction based on the effects in the film. All the joy of seeing your neighborhood bombed and on fire, without actually killing those annoying neighbors with the dog who barks all day.

Code as a design tool How to use code as your primary design tool talks about the process of using code as your main tool for design, rather than a secondary tool that comes after mocking up a complete design in Photoshop or Sketch. Chris Gannon talks about his entire process, including the tools he uses for designing with code.

Better typography design Typeanything shows the importance of using real words for your mockups rather than dummy text that only visually resembles text on a page rather than actually representing the kind of text users will eventually see and/or enter. Enter the text you want to test, and then play around with the type settings for H1-H3 and P tags.

A better look and feel for Skype Skype is an invaluable communications tool for both personal and business use. And yet the desktop apps aren't exactly the most aesthetically pleasing UIs on the market. This Skype for Mac Concept would change all that. It has a greatly improved user interface design that's cleaner while also retaining Skype's strong brand.

Who knew NASA had so much code available? Code NASA is a code repository from NASA that collects all of the source code they agency has made available to the public. There are over 250 open source software projects from NASA, including everything from Quick Image Processing to the SLAB Spatial Audio Renderer. But probably the coolest thing in the collection is either the Mission Simulation Toolkit or the General Mission Analysis Tool.

Looking for some classy names? Jenkenson is a classy name generator that will give you "classy"-sounding names to use in your projects. One of the standout features, though, is that there are names from a variety of cultures, making it a much more globally-friendly tool. Some favorites that it generated: Gosling, Gazzaniga, Mikel, and Aguero.

Be more productive in Dropbox Dropbox Productivity tools are here, and they aim to make your Dropbox use way more productive. There are new tools for capturing ideas wherever you have them via mobile (via Microsoft Office files, photos, or scanned documents), better collaboration tools with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, and better feedback tools. The new tools turn Dropbox and Microsoft into more direct competitors with Google Drive.

Love fonts? Random Font not only shows you a random typeface whenever you load the page, but also gives you background information on the type displayed. Get info on the designer, the publisher, and some history of how the font came to be. It's a great way to discover new fonts while also expanding your knowledge about the typefaces out there.