Plaquemaxxing

A tool designed to teach plaque and historical marker design concepts, plus a builder to make ones for real. Visit→

Brickpress

A tool that helps you plan out and shop for Lego block printing projects – design with up to 3 colors, get block counts and to-scale patterns you can print out and refer to. Visit→

PDF Weight Inspector

The first of many tools designed to counteract Adobe’s incredibly bloated suite of apps: why is my PDF so giant and what is taking up so much space so I can intentionally compress it? Visit→

Monotype Mirror

A photobooth that converts your likeness into actual ASCII art in real time, recordable or printable as actual text. Visit→

Accounting for Creatives

A teaching tool for creatives (or really any fresh entrepreneur) to understand the cost differences between hobbies and a business, deductions, and record-keeping. Visit→

Sticky Scout

Another in the “we hate Acrobat” camp: I like to mark off stickies as I complete the text edits, but it’s such a slog. This tool makes it easy, and also has the ability to collect and flag stickies that you have questions about, so you can easily relay back to the client. Visit→

Watermark Stamp

A totally free and browser-only watermarking tool that lets you upload your own image, control where it goes and how it looks, and batch-add it to as many images as you want. No login required. Visit→

Tilt Booth

You know the text style that you have to fully tilt to be able to read the words? Why not make that into a photobooth that still lets you print a series of photos, but they must be tilted to be visible? Why not????? Visit→

Dot Fill

I like to fill shapes with dots sometimes as visual interest, but either doing it randomly or doing it on a grid takes too long or looks too ugly. There are illustrator tools for this, but I’ve never been that happy with them. This makes it easy. Visit→

Curious about the process for these? Learn more on the blog.

Design Emporium Shop Tools