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

Here's what landed on 23 October: thirty free tools and websites, ten open-source projects from GitHub and one paid AI video platform. I've grouped 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.

For design and media work

Blush gives you illustration collections by artists around the world, and you can customise them by changing poses, colours, backgrounds and accessories. The free plan has unlimited PNG downloads with no attribution needed. SVG files, print-resolution images and some collections need a paid plan. Logoipsum is a free collection of more than 200 fictional placeholder logos you can grab as SVG or PNG for mockups and presentations. Wordmark shows a word or brand name in every font installed on your device, so comparing typefaces side by side takes seconds.

StockSnap is a library of high-resolution stock photos released under the CC0 licence, free for personal and commercial use without attribution. Some results are sponsored links to paid sites, so watch for those. Namelix uses AI to suggest short, brandable names from a few keywords, with domain ideas next to 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 been publishing free tutorials and demos on animation, WebGL, CSS and layout since 2009, though plenty of them assume some coding experience.

Kapwing is a video editor that runs in your browser. Trim clips, add subtitles, resize for social platforms or record your screen. The free plan exports videos up to four minutes at 720p with a watermark. Clipdrop puts AI image tools like background removal, upscaling, cleanup and relighting into one web app. Most tools give you about 20 free uses a day, and high-resolution results come with Pro.

Finding tools and open 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. How well the linked tools are kept up varies. opensource.builders lists open-source alternatives to well-known proprietary apps and shows which features they share with the original. switching.software is a community-run list of ethical, privacy-conscious alternatives to products from big tech companies. F-Droid is a catalogue of free and open-source Android apps built from source, and its listings flag anti-features like tracking or ads. It's Android only, and updates can show up later than on Google Play.

Handy web and developer utilities

urlscan.io visits a URL in a safe environment and tells you about the domains, scripts, redirects and screenshots behind the page, plus any phishing or malware verdicts. Free scans can be public, so don't submit 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. RANDOM.ORG generates random numbers from atmospheric noise. Its number, list and password tools are free, and certified draws are paid.

Shields.io serves free, open-source badges for build status, versions, downloads and licences. 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's 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 straight into code comments and messages.

Meetings, planning and reading as a group

Mentimeter runs live polls, quizzes, word clouds and Q&A that people answer from their phones. 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 making an account. There's no calendar integration, though.

Sejda has 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, and files are deleted after two hours. Paid passes remove the limits.

For learning and research

JavaScript.info is a free, in-depth tutorial on 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 covering React, Node.js, MongoDB, GraphQL, TypeScript and testing. You'll need basic programming knowledge and a real time commitment. OneLook searches over a thousand online dictionaries at once, and its reverse dictionary helps you find 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. Still, always check your citations before you submit.

Open-source projects worth a look

Ollama is a free app for downloading and running open language models such as Llama, Gemma, Qwen and Mistral on your own computer, so your data stays on your machine. Bigger models need a powerful computer. MarkItDown, from Microsoft, converts PDFs, Office files, HTML, images and audio into Markdown. Docling turns documents into clean Markdown or JSON and understands layout, tables and formulas along the way. 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. Readest is an ebook reader for EPUB, MOBI and PDF with highlights, text-to-speech and sync across devices; it won't open DRM-protected books. BookStack is a self-hosted wiki that organises documentation into shelves, books, chapters and pages. Huly pulls 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, and it works with the existing WakaTime editor plugins. Appsmith is a low-code platform for building internal tools like admin panels and dashboards. Some advanced features sit in paid plans, and complex apps still need coding skills.

And one for AI video

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

That's forty-one additions, sitting alongside everything else in the directory. Browse the full Best Productivity Resources directory to compare them with other tools in each category.