Maker Design Tools

Design is so important when it comes to building products and Mark's the guy who knows the ins and outs! Clearly, he is adding a lot of value to the maker community with this launch. Excited to see how makers take advantage of the pool of knowledge he gathered!

You can be confident that Mark always puts every effort in to ensuring top quality and best value for users of his products. They always look awesome too! Pure class.

Hey everyone, Thanks for checking out Maker Design Tools. As a designer turned indie maker, I'm aiming to help other makers with design so they can build better. I decided to create Maker Design Tools for Makerpad's T30 challenge. It was an opportunity to combine a need I was aware of with a type of product I had been wanting to create. It's a database of over 150 design tools and resources to help indie makers find quality design resources. While researching another product I'm working on (tinydesignlessons.com) I spoke to many makers who just wanted an easier way to find the best tools and resources, rather than to learn design. So I decided to make this database for them, with the aim to make it really useful as well. I had also been wanting to create a database-style product for a while using one of my favourite tools, Airtable. What I like about this kind of product is that it's a different kind of design challenge. Instead of making a beautiful visual design, you can focus almost solely on designing with the data – its quality, usefulness, and how easy it is to access. The product has two tiers – a free selection viewable on the website, and the full database can be accessed with a simple, one-off purchase. The database will grow over time, and I also aim to enhance the curation detail and search facilities too. Another thing I've focussed on with this project is keeping my own design work limited to the tools in the database. I didn't want to showcase my own design skills, but instead show that makers can easily leverage design by using available resources. I've even added a list of the resources that I used to build it on the website. If you know of resources or tools I've not included, or want to suggest other ways to search – let me know. Thank you for reading and I hope you find it useful!

So so needed! This is a cracking resource to identify the best design tools to use. Thanks for bringing this to life Mark!

Super useful. Really excited to dive in

Love this! Design is always the biggest struggle of any project. It makes a huge difference to have access to good resources. Thank you Mark for creating this.

Congrats on launching Mark, excited to see this go out!