Top 11 recent tools, apps and technologies to kickstart your sideproject

What's in today's menu: lots of 3D, no-code website and video game builders, plugins, fancy icons, and much more.

And as we respect our traditions, we left the best resources at the end. Trust us - you'll like them!

So, without further ado - let's get started ⏬

DrawKit 3D Builder is a Figma plugin that creates cool 3D objects that can be used in a wide variety of projects.

At the moment the library has more than 400 objects.

Collections are divided into the following categories: cryptocurrency, icons, user interface, primitive, objects for social media and sparks.

If you work in Canva, you can now use icons from Iconscout. Your designs will become even more interesting with more than 3 million cool objects integrated via the Iconscout app.

With a huge variety of icons, you can use them for almost any project in Canva. And in addition, the plugin is very simple and easy to use.

If you don't know where to find certain information regarding design, Toools.design is the perfect solution. This awesome library consists of more than 900 design resources and tools.

Five fresh resources are added every week.

Books, tutorials, podcasts, resources for inspiration, information on typography, illustrations, UI kits, and much much more can be found on this website.

This plugin converts your Figma designs into a website. After clicking the "Publish" button, Makers will create a website on a custom domain.

The plugin has one nuance - at the design stage you have to create the UI using the built-in Makers components. But this is important because you are telling the system what you are about to create. Whether it's a website header, a button, or a navigation bar - with built-in components, Makers will understand your commands.

To securely save your websites - you'll need to create a Makers account.

At the moment, with this plugin you can create the following types of websites: landing pages, portfolios, blogs, and wiki-pages.

You can also use Makers templates, they are available here.

Tutorials on how to work with this plugin are available here.

NextUI is an incredibly stylish, user-friendly and very fast UI library based on React. With this system, the process of creating websites becomes better and faster. Even if you have no experience in design at all.

This product has several default themes (NextUI, Modern, Elegant, Retro), it works faster than other UI libraries (by avoiding unnecessary style props at runtime). The dark theme pleases the eye, and it looks very powerful and trendy.

The components in NextUI are designed in a way that makes developers' lives easier, allowing them to avoid having to import multiple components to display only one.

Also, the customization process is much easier as well. NextUI is based on the excellent CSS-in-JS library called Stitches, thanks to which you can manipulate CSS by using styled functions or adding your own CSS class names.

Shottr is a new player in the world of screenshots, created in Swift. It's an application that allows you to take the full-length screenshots of a web page, and it also has the most powerful zoom and is designed for people who like speed and are used to working with hotkeys.

With Shottr you have a lot of room to work with. Here are the main functions of the program:

1. Screenshots markup: you have the flexibility of adding the text annotations to screenshots, as well as drawing lines, arrows and shapes.
   
2. Hide objects or delete information - you can always hide the unnecessary part of the screen or delete certain data.
   
3. Zooming - one of Shottr's strongest features. So, if you need to see something in more detail, the problem is solved with a screenshot and zoom.
   
4. Text Recognition (OCR) - sometimes there are situations when text does not stand out. Shottr will help you parse the text and copy it to the clipboard.
   
5. Color picker - when you take a screenshot, you can copy the color you want by hovering your cursor over a certain pixel.

Mesh is an excellent library of 3D elements consisting of more than 200 illustrations and icons. And it's the perfect solution for creating thumbnails for websites, apps and social media.

Mesh has an intuitive interface, and the process of working with elements is very flexible - you have the ability to design colors, transform elements and materials. The library consists of several stylish collections that will perfectly complement websites and presentations in light and dark themes: Black, Colorful, Neon and Abstract. The authors promise to add more collections soon.

All your workflows with 3D compositions and the subsequent 3D rendering are done directly in the browser.

Simplified Design is a very cool and beautifully designed app for simplifying marketing processes and brand building. If you have your own company that needs social media promotion, or if you work as a digital marketer, this resource will be a great helper for you.

You can work alone or in a collaboration mode. Simplified Design is perfect for freelancers, business owners, and brand-building teams.

There are hundreds of beautiful templates to help you create and beautifully design all kinds of graphic content, whether it's photos or videos, in no time at all.

It is integrated with different applications such as: Unsplash, GIPHY, Shopify, Pixabay, etc. And as a bonus: Simplified Design has automation tools that handle the little things so you can focus on your main goals.

The top three in our list is opened by Breshna. If you've ever dreamed of creating video games without programming skills, this product is for you. This system is a no-code platform, thanks to which you can create video games quickly and effortlessly.

At the moment, you can create games in the following categories:

• Education
• Social and Entertainment
• Games with a good message
• Enterprise
• Health

Framer Sites is in second place, which continues to gain momentum and is stepping on the heels of all the major design and development companies (and bypassing some of them already). Having originally been a prototyping tool, and later becoming a design tool, the company decided to go even further. Their next product, the Framer Sites is a no-code builder and it is designed to beat the competition by:

1. Having all the work inside Framer. You do not need to complicate processes - just create a design and press the Publish button. This is how Framer is ready to replace Figma and Webflow.
   
2. Simplified work with stacks. No need to be dependent on front-end developers. This is a replacement for Sketch, Github, etc.
   
3. Simplified documentation. Framer allows you to create good documentation within its ecosystem without relying on third-party services. This is the replacement for Notion and Adobe XD.

And if you have projects in Figma, you can copy and paste your Figma designs to Framer without much difficulty. Framer is becoming an even stronger player in the market.

The leader of our list today is the online presentation platform Pitch. This handy, fast, flexible, and importantly, free product will help you create gorgeous presentations in minutes.

The app currently has over 100 templates in categories such as: Pitch Decks, Marketing, Startups, Design, Proposals, Professionals and much more. All of them are perfectly customizable - you can change colors or fonts, fitting the designs to your needs.

It's easy to work with Pitch because you have a choice of: 1) importing an existing PowerPoint presentation into Pitch, 2) starting working from one of the platform templates, or 3) starting creating a presentation in Pitch from scratch.

Also, the platform has a collaborative mode, which gives additional possibilities in terms of contribution, having different opinions, and as a result - better outcomes.

The integration of Pitch with other systems such as Icons8, Brand Logos, Unsplash, and others is also worth mentioning. This gives you the opportunity to add your own flavor using the tools you have worked with before. The integration doesn't stop there - you can add pictures, videos, or infographics through Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Chartmogul, etc.

So if you want your presentations to be top-notch, Pitch is at your service.

And this is it for today, folks. Thank you for your time. We hope you enjoyed the content and that it was useful.

We are constantly watching for new products and news from the world of design.

If you want to stay up-to-date or receive interesting content, subscribe to our mailing list. We have a Youtube channel, as well as Dribbble, Behance, Medium, Reddit, so feel free to give us a visit.

Also, don't forget to check out our homepage at Setproduct, where you can get templates for your next project. And consider using our design systems and UI kits - they will save you tons of time and effort when working in Figma.

Keep creating cool stuff! We'll see you soon.