Free resources from the design community can enhance an ecommerce site. Here is a list of new web tools and design elements from winter 2024. The tools include generative AI shortcuts, logo creation, mockup generators, coding, animations, background images and audio, domain names, free fonts, and more.

All of the tools are free or have free plans, though most also offer premium versions. The fonts are free for commercial projects. Before using a font, be sure to verify its terms.

Free Design Tools

ThinkBuddy AI is a native ChatGPT client for macOS. Use voice or screenshots to ask AI, execute commands with text selection, create and save custom prompts, customize shortcuts for quick use, and dictate with Whisper. Choose from the selection of AI models to customize your macOS AI experience.

Gem Domains is a free search engine for expired domains. Enter keywords, organic search data, price range, and more. Use it to find the domain for your next project.

Logo Packer is a web app that generates logo variations. Instantly create the variations (black, white, and inverse color), export in multiple formats, and stay organized with structured folders.

Shotune is a screenshot mockup generator. With its library of device frames, Shotune supports a wide range of devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. Generate backgrounds to complement your mockup. Easily add text, shapes, and overlays to create a unique and personalized look.

Smudge.ai is a Chrome extension that provides online access to ChatGPT-powered shortcuts. Create and edit engaging content, or bridge language barriers with AI-powered translations.

Slogan Generator is a tool to generate one-sentence marketing summaries for your business. Enter your business description and audience, and generate 30 slogans for free. It’s a fun tool to help find the perfect hook.

Recraft is a generative AI design tool for creating and editing digital illustrations, vector art, icons, and three-dimensional graphics in a uniform brand style. Upload an image, and Recraft will replicate more in the same style.

Codingoals is a platform to learn how to code JavaScript, React, and CSS through puzzles and challenges. Learn how to build a single-page application using JavaScript and understand the benefits of modern frameworks such as React or Angular.

Mix.audio is a multimodal AI music generator that creates and customizes quality background music. Use the wizard to generate royalty-free music by scanning your ideas through text, images, and even audio information.

Creatica is a web app that generates unique SVG and vector backgrounds. It offers a vast library of designs, from intricate geometric patterns to fluid gradients. Use the real-time preview to see how each customization impacts your design.

BlitzBear is a web app for search engine optimization that cuts the manual work of improving your content. It combs through your articles and compares them against your competitors’ search engine result listings. It then serves your optimized pages after you preview and approve changes.

Audio Note AI is an app that turns thoughts into practical text. Speak your ideas, and let AI refine them into formats of your choice, such as journal entries, tweets, notes, lists, or LinkedIn posts.

Lottiebox is a Lottie animation library and set of animation tools to help users stand out from standard web experiences. Utilize pre-made, eye-catching animations for websites, presentations, newsletters, mobile apps, decks, email, and social media.

Data Dead Drop is a data storage bank that self-destroys content after access. Upload content and specify how long it should be kept. Share your link, or use it to download your file, which is automatically destroyed after being accessed a predefined period or number of times.

Free Fonts

Leentank is a sans-serif display font in four styles. Rounded and geometric, Leentank is suitable for eye-catching displays and logos.

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Kids Ballad is an all-cap handwritten font that’s friendly yet legible.

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Voye is a striking geometric sans-serif font for headlines, displays, and small paragraphs. Its simplicity conveys a modern elegance.

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Pingsan is a chunky, rounded display font with comfort and cheer. The feel-good characters lend a good vibe to any message or brand.

Amazon Web Services has launched a number of new generative AI capabilities in Amazon Connect, its cloud contact centre service, in an effort to help contact centres improve their services and enhance quality assurance. 

Included in the range of generative AI capabilities, Amazon Web Services is launching ‘Amazon Q in Connect’, which provides agents with recommended responses and actions based on real-time customer questions. It is also launching ‘Amazon Connect Contact Lens’, which adds AI-generated summaries of customer conversations for quality management purposes; ‘Amazon Lex in Amazon Connect’, which uses generative AI to make it easier to build effective self-service experiences for customers; and ‘Amazon Connect Customer Profiles’, which aggregates customer data from popular software-as-a-service applications.

Customers using the service include NatWest Group, NeuraFlash, Traeger Grills and USAN.

AWS explained that generative AI offers an unprecedented opportunity for contact centre leaders to redefine how they create and measure their customers’ experiences. Amazon Connect removes the challenges of building and deploying models in contact centres by allowing non-technical business leaders to set up a cloud contact centre with generative AI capabilities within minutes.

Pasquale DeMaio, vice president of Amazon Connect at AWS Applications, explained: “The contact centre industry is poised to be fundamentally transformed by generative AI, offering customer service agents, contact centre supervisors, and contact centre administrators new ways to deliver personalised customer experiences even more effectively.”

In addition to these new generative AI enhancements, Amazon Connect has extended omnichannel capabilities to include out-of-the-box support for two-way SMS messaging, as well as in-app and web voice calling with video support.

Bolstering customer support and experiences

With ‘Amazon Q in Connect’, AWS looks to assist agents with recommended responses and actions for faster customer support. This enhancement helps understand customer intents and uses relevant sources of information to deliver accurate responses and actions for the agent to communicate and resolve unique customer needs, all in real time.

‘Amazon Connect Contact Lens’ generates concise customer contact summaries after each interaction, providing supervisors with context-rich details.

To simplify bot building and improve self-service experiences, the cloud computing giant introduced the ‘Amazon Lex in Amazon Connect’ capability. From the Amazon Lex administrator console, contact centre administrators can create robust chatbots and IVRs by simply describing in natural language what they want the self-service system to accomplish.

Finally ‘Amazon Connect Customer Profiles’ automatically creates unified customer profiles for personalised customer experiences. Using a minimal number of clicks, managers can review, make any necessary edits, and complete the setup of customer profiles so contact centre teams can begin providing personalised customer service that improves customer satisfaction and agent productivity.

XXImo, a corporate mobility payments platform, is set to become one of the first EU Visa card issuers to process payments entirely through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in Q1 2024.

By processing payments through AWS Payment Cryptography and Visa Cloud Connect, XXImo is hoping to optimise operational expenses and scale its business to help make flexible mobility payments accessible to corporate employers and resellers across Europe.

Processing its payments entirely through AWS will also help XXImo scale and optimise its platform requirements, as well as give it the infrastructure to rapidly expand its business throughout Europe.

Zaheer Sacranie, chief technology officer at XXImo, said: “Going all-in on AWS and processing payments in the cloud will transform our business, providing a powerful new foundation for growth and innovation. This is an investment in the future of XXImo that we believe is already delivering strong returns.”

As a licensed Payment and Electronic Money Institution (EMI), XXImo offers mobility payment cards with compliant payment processing directly to corporations, and as white-label solutions to resellers in the fuel, parking, charging, fleet management and leasing space. XXlmo projects that the demand for these compliant services will drive significant growth over the next two years.

Tanuja Randery, managing director of AWS Europe, Middle East, and Africa, also commented on the news: “XXImo’s commitment to innovation and enabling sustainability for its customers aligns perfectly with AWS’s own values. This opens up exciting potential synergies between the two businesses going forward, and we’re looking forward to seeing where XXImo’s innovative use of the cloud will take it next.”

Growing demand for sustainability reporting

XXImo supports modern mobility policies and provides its customers with detailed analysis of their employees’ mobility footprint, enabling them to meet requirements for reporting carbon emissions from their businesses.

With XXImo cards accepted over the entire mobility network, including air travel, hotels, all forms of public transport, car hire, bike and scooter sharing and fuel, customers can give their employees more options for how they travel while measuring and managing their environmental impact.

XXImo is responding to the growing demand driven by sustainability reporting and regulations by going all-in on AWS, closing its data centres and migrating all operations to AWS. This will help ensure continuity, security, as well as scalability for its payment processing platform.

Implementing a cloud-native strategy with AWS will also enable XXImo to expand the scope of its research and development with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, exploring how generative artificial intelligence can improve the experience of managing mobility for customers and their employees while using machine learning to add new layers of analysis to its reporting.

Many free resources from the design community can enhance an ecommerce site. Here is a list of new web tools and design elements from fall 2023. There are tools for color palettes, UX design, presentations, logo generation, carousels, email templates, free fonts, and more.

All of these tools are free or have free plans, though most also offer premium versions. The fonts are free for commercial projects. Before using a font, be sure to verify its terms.

Free Design Tools

Perception is an AI-powered tool to generate color combinations or palettes. Perception also leverages color psychology research data to help determine palettes likely to convey a desired mood. Quickly and easily create visually appealing color schemes that emotionally connect with target audiences.

Supademo creates interactive demos and guides. The latest update features generative AI to create how-to docs and text annotations. Personalize Supademo based on demo type, intent, and the element clicked in each slide. The update also features advanced analytics, video support, collaboration improvements, and more. The free version includes up to five demos.

Pitch 2.0 is a platform to create and share presentations. The 2.0 update features an AI presentation generator, a links overview page to manage outreach, new animations, a duplication button to create your own templates, a gallery for shared decks, and more. The premium plan includes version history.

Punkt is an all-in-one user-experience writing and content design platform, soon to launch. The platform states it will harness content to craft experiences, lead design, shape interactions, and drive user engagement. Sign up for the beta waiting list.

Venngage Accessible Design Tool ensures accessibility to your content on the Venngage infographics platform. Explore the visual simulator to improve accessibility for people with visual impairments. Enhance accessibility with AI-generated alt text. Simplify pie charts, graphs, and more. Click “Check Accessibility” before completing your design to detect compliance issues and make necessary edits.

Told is an in-product pop-up survey tool to collect user feedback. Build event-triggered in-product surveys and announcements without code. Identify users (without asking) via hidden fields. The free plan allows 150 reaches per month.

Postnitro is an AI-powered tool to create branded carousels for social media. Access core carousel capabilities and templates and generate unlimited carousels. Instantly apply your logo, colors, name, and more to any template.

Zoviz is an online logo maker for branding. Get one-click logos and icons. Zoviz charges for final files; before that, you can view, create, and edit your versions for free.

Workverse 2.0 is an update to the virtual workspace platform. Meet with your teams and collaborate using high-definition video chats, screen-share, and virtual whiteboards. Manage projects and get work done through task management, AI chatbot, privacy protection, health tools, and more. Free space sessions are limited to 10 guests for 60 minutes.

Grammar Checker & Rewriter from Linguix is a multi-lingual grammar checker and rewriter for Figma, the design platform. Grammar Checker & Rewriter analyzes content as you write and underlines mistakes or sentences in a given FIgma object. Apply corrections in one click or expand them for more context.

Tabular is a no-code design tool to create responsive emails. Design high-performing email templates and campaigns using the email template builder — directly from the editor. Download up to two free HTML or PDF emails per month.

Free Fonts

Adecko is a bold and bubbly graffiti font with plenty of energetic street style.

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Lost Type, an update from 2018, is based on Vietnam’s rich typographic heritage, paying homage to a bygone era.

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Bigger is a condensed all-cap display font with minimal roundness and small gaps to emphasize the blocks.

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Fonzie is a versatile font with four styles, offering tradition and innovation. Its basic style provides an elegant, space-saving condensed form.

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Murah is an elegant handwritten font infused with modernity and charm. It’s an all-caps font that helps convey info in a friendly manner.

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Lemon is a heavy, condensed typeface for display. The font family comes in nine weights and eighteen styles. The regular weight is free.

GTA and CoD veterans’ new studio collabs with Immutable

Web3 gaming ecosystem Immutable is helping Random Games join the blockchain gaming world. The studio was founded by veteran developers and storytellers from famous franchises including Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Fortnite, Batman, Star Trek, The Walking Dead, Star Wars and South Park. The collaboration centers around Unioverse, a Web3 sci-fi franchise spanning multiple mediums.

Random Games plans to create a platform offering high-quality assets for game creation without royalty fees. The Unioverse community will be encouraged to produce their own stories, games and content using official assets.

Unioverse hopes to foster a continuous stream of professional and user-generated content, given its royalty-free nature. Users can monetize their creations by selling merchandise such as comic books, T-shirts and lunchboxes and retain all the profits.

Immutable’s vice president of global business development, Andrew Sorokovsky says Immutable will provide the blockchain platform, tools and services, including its zkEVM for scaling and Immutable passport for digital IDs:

This will allow the team to focus on shipping a great game without having to become blockchain experts in the process — letting us take care of the heavy lifting,”

Unioverse features Hero NFTs, which are high-quality 3D digital items that you can own in the digital world. Hero NFTs started minting with ‘Reyu’ in Jan. 2023 and sold 20,000 NFTs, which was followed by the launch of ‘Krishah’ in June. With over a million NFTs minted and more than 110,000 verified accounts with connected wallets, they also debuted the first part of a six-part comic book series and introduced Proving Grounds, their first alpha game environment, in May.

Random Games previously raised $7.6 million in a seed funding round co-led by Resolute Ventures and Asymmetric.

Brawlers by Magic: The Gathering creator to launch on Epic Games Store

Brawlers, a player-versus-player blockchain card game will be launched on the massive, mainstream Epic Games Store.

It’s the debut game of Tyranno Studios, WAX blockchain’s inhouse game development team led by gaming industry veteran Michael Rubinelli, who has 25 years of experience at companies such as Disney, Electronic Arts and THQ.

Centered around the theme of pro-wrestling, Brawlers’ player-versus-player (PvP) mode was designed by Richard Garfield, famous for his creation of the popular card game Magic: The Gathering.

Releasing a blockchain game on EGS is a big deal for any developer, as the platform has over 230 million users, including 70 million monthly active users. But releasing a blockchain game on the platform is an even bigger deal as Web3 companies generally can’t access such a massive audience under such a reputable name. WAX’s Chief Gaming Officer Rubinelli calls EGS the “next step on our journey to the mass adoption of Web3.”

This launch further accelerates the paradigm shift in gaming as a whole, bringing blockchain-powered fairness, inclusivity and player-centric approach even closer to the mainstream audience.”

In the game, players compete in wrestling matches and earn BRWL tokens which can be used to craft or purchase content. Apart from the Brawlers themselves, every in-game item can be crafted, used, sold, traded or gifted among players as they’re NFTs.

Garfield emphasized the game’s similarity to traditional physical card games, where players can buy card sets and maintain complete control over their assets, enabling easy trading and exchange.

The game allows cross-platform functionality via NFT bridges to Polygon, Ethereum and Binance’s BNB Chain.

Over $2 billion invested in blockchain gaming so far in 2023

Blockchain gaming investments are up $600 million in the third quarter of 2023, bringing the year-to-date total to an impressive $2.3 billion in the midst of a bear market, according to DappRadar and BGA Games’ most recent joint blockchain gaming report.

However, 2023’s tally only accounts for 30% of the preceding year’s total investments. But considering the state of the wider market, it’s a respectable figure that proves that a lot of people are willing to bet a lot of money that blockchain games will still be The Next Big Thing.

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The report underscores how Web2 gaming giants are “making assertive strides into the Web3 realm.” One of the most notable being FarmVille creator Zynga’s successful introduction of Sugartown, which received instant adoption and high praise from the Web3 community. It’s a welcome development as better studios generally mean better games.

Daily unique active wallets (UAWs) saw an uptick of 12% compared to last quarter, reaching a daily average of 786,766 UAWs. Alien Worlds, a community-built metaverse, kept its crown as the most-played blockchain game of Q3 2023, capturing over 60% of WAX’s blockchain activity.

Web3 gaming’s flagship titles, Axie Infinity and Gods Unchained, blazed the trail in terms of transaction volume, with volumes of $90 million and $55 million, respectively.

In the third quarter, virtual worlds experienced a dip from the last quarter’s $58 million as numbers showed $13 million in trading volume with 28,000 land sales. Despite virtual worlds’ declining trading volume, substantial investments like Animoca Brands’ $20 million funding for Mocaverse keep the metaverse fire alive.

Upland’s Spark shines on Ethereum

Metaverse platform Upland will enable trading of its in-game utility token, Spark, on Ethereum. The decision was approved by 87.25% of voters in a recent community governance vote.

Results Are In! The UIP-2 vote on the Sparklet White Paper has passed with an 87.25% YES vote!

This means the Upland Team’s proposal to move forward with the process of making Spark tradable on external exchanges has been approved by the Community. STAY TUNED for more! pic.twitter.com/cCa54KsmzD

— Upland (@UplandMe) October 11, 2023

Known as the Sparklet White Paper, the proposal was presented to the Upland community in late September. The plan involves bridging the game’s in-app token, Spark, to the Ethereum blockchain, where it will be mirrored and minted as the Sparklet token. Each Sparklet is equivalent to one-thousandth of a Spark.

Upland co-founder and co-CEO Dirk Lueth says the move is a win for decentralization:

Adhering to our mission to build the largest digital open economy, Sparklet allows us to take the next step towards progressive decentralization in a responsible way by offering tradability to our users while having mechanisms in place that can shield and protect Upland’s economy from unwanted externalities.”

A finite supply of 1,000,000,000 Sparklet tokens will be issued on Ethereum, although Upland has not shared the exact timeline yet. The Sparklet supply will be mirrored by the minting of 1,000,000 Spark on the EOS blockchain, ensuring a balanced ownership structure between the platforms.

Hot Take: Guild of Guardians

Guild of Guardians is a mobile rogue-lite squad RPG that is being developed by Mineloader and published by Immutable. It held a “friends and family demo event” this week for testing and I was one of the fortunate people that got to try the game.

As soon as the game opens, nicely composed Harry Potter-esque background music welcomes you to the world of Guardians. The demo consists of core dungeon battles, crafting loops, quests and level-up options. The graphics look decent, while the music and sound effects are on point.

Players assemble a team of heroes and venture into dungeons for combat. When assembling a team, you need to consider factional, elemental and class synergies and team composition. For instance, a team composed entirely of Hordes receives a raw attack boost, while teams of all fire elements have an increased chance of inflicting damage over time. Heroes are also split into traditional RPG roles like tank, healer, support and DPS – short for damage per second, which is used to describe damage-focused characters.

The main challenge Guild of Guardians needs to tackle is that squad-based PvP gaming has somewhat matured. None of the heroes feel original or new, and the user interface looks like every fantasy-element-bearing mobile game ever.

Of course, it’s not fair to judge such aspects by a “friends & family” demo, so it’s better to check the full version to see if there are improvements and refinements to form your own opinions — it’s going to be free-to-play anyway. Who knows, you might love it and find your next 600-hour addiction!

More from Web3 gaming space:

– Zynga’s Web3 IP Sugartown introduces an NFT collection called Oras.

– NFL Rivals announces 6-month partnership with Amazon Prime Gaming.

– Gods Unchained Season 2: Tides of Fate launches Oct. 25.

– Social web game Habbo ditches ‘Habbo NFTs’ for ‘Habbo Collectibles’ in its terminology.

– Animoca Brands subsidiary Darewise raises $3.5 million in token presale for sci-fi Web3 game Life Beyond.

– Business simulation strategy game Legacy launches on Oct. 26.

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Erhan Kahraman

Based in Istanbul, Erhan started his career as a gaming journalist. He now works as a freelance writer and content creator with a focus on cutting-edge technology and video games. He enjoys playing Elden Ring, Street Fighter 6 and Persona 5.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has finally made the move to expand his metaverse Horizon Worlds from virtual reality headsets to people’s smartphones and computers.

The 3D avatar-based social platform announced in a Sept. 15 blog post that it has started rolling out its first Meta Horizon world to mobile and web in an early access state. 

The only experience immediately available is Super Rumble, a free-for-all shooter that launched in late July, allowing two to six players to come together in fast-paced matches lasting five minutes. Meta said that more experiences and worlds will be coming to the platform over the coming months. 

With the initial rollout, only a small number of people will be able to access it on the web or the Meta Quest app on Android, with an iOS rollout slated for the coming weeks.

“Early access will roll out to more people gradually as we gather feedback and evolve the experience,” said Meta. 

“The metaverse should be available to everyone — no matter what device they’re on,” the tech giant added.

“And while Quest headsets are the most immersive way to access the metaverse, we believe there should be multiple entry points.”

Meta said bringing Worlds to more devices will open up the experience to more people. Meta hasn’t released any public statistics on its monthly active users, but a report from The Wall Street Journal in October 2022 suggested it was less than 200,000. 

Meta’s social platform is still currently only available in Canada, France, Iceland, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. 

Related: Meta ‘ruined’ the term metaverse, but now it’s evolving: Yuga Labs CEO

Interestingly, blockchain-based metaverse platforms, including Decentraland and The Sandbox, seemingly started their journey the other way around. 

Both launched as PC and web-based experiences first, with Decentraland launching its browser-based 3D virtual world in February 2020 and The Sandbox launching its Alpha on PC in November 2021. Both have yet to release an official virtual reality port. 

We’ve got legs!

Meanwhile, Meta avatars in Horizon Worlds have finally received a long-awaited update — virtual legs. 

Zuckerberg initially copped criticism after the launch of his metaverse, with observers noting that the massive investment from the firm couldn’t even give its avatars virtual legs. During Connect 2022, Meta promised the legs would come in an eventual update sometime in 2023. 

The legs functionality was reportedly already introduced to Quest Home space some weeks ago as a v57 test version update, but some users have reported the legs have now made their way onto the Horizon Worlds app. 

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