Snippets: July 2026

Snippets is a monthly roundup of resources, news items, inspiration and fun for designers. Have a cool book, show, site, game, app, resource, etc. that you’d recommend to your designer friends? Send it to ed*******@*********ro.com.

Kern Your Enthusiasm

Ever spent way too long hunting for the perfect ampersand or lowercase g? What a silly question. We’ve all done that! But maybe never again, thanks to Glyph Finder, a fun new Adobe Fonts side project. This nifty tool lets you plug in a Unicode value (or just type in what you want) to instantly see that glyph in tons of typefaces. It’s an incredibly fast, visual way to track down the perfect glyph. It also lets you roll the dice and browse random glyphs like finds in a vintage thrift store (sure beats doomscrolling!).

Your Design, by the Yard

Spoonflower lets you upload original patterns and have them printed on more than 60 fabric types, wallpaper, and home décor, with orders as small as a single test swatch. You can then sell your patterns in Spoonflower’s marketplace, building passive income from work that might otherwise sit in a portfolio folder.

Photo Finder

The iOS Photos app lets you search for images by AI-recognized content, location, or faces. But it lacks the basic feature to search by filename. The Search Photos Media by File Name shortcut lets you enter one or more keywords and retrieve every matching image or video from your library by its exact file name. Results can be previewed in Quick Look, saved to a default search album, or routed to any existing album.

Halftone Heroics

Sabo Sugi’s browser-based Dither / ASCII Effect Pro on CodePen applies halftone and dithering effects—flow field, edge detect, moiré, CRT scanline, bio-organic, and more—using circles, stars, hearts, custom SVGs, and other shapes as rendering units. It’s completely free to use, needs no installation, and produces the kind of gritty, editorial retro-tech imagery that is currently in vogue for editorial design.

In Harmony with Hue

The Infinite Harmony Panel for Photoshop, developed by retoucher Pratik Naik, walks you through building a custom color grade by selecting a base hue and applying up to five coordinated tones across highlights, midtones, and shadows. The Harmonize feature derives a triadic color scheme from tones already in your image. All adjustment layers remain fully editable afterward. Compatible with CC2021 and later; currently free with purchase of the Infinite Color Panel.

Get in Line(s)

Vexy Lines by FontLab transforms photos and illustrations into vector artwork using 12 fill styles—engravings, waves, halftones, spirals, fractals, text, and more. Export clean SVG, PDF, or EPS files that scale without complaint. A free trial of this desktop program includes all features; export requires a one-time $99 license.

Say It with Balloons 

Speeech 2, the updated free script from Marc Autret at Indiscripts, automates speech balloon creation in InDesign. Select any shape, indicate the pointer direction, run the script, and InDesign generates a properly formed balloon with a smooth curved tail. Supports rotated, scaled, and skewed shapes. 

A Tribute to PageMaker’s Maker

Paul Brainerd, co-founder of Aldus Corporation and the person who coined the term “desktop publishing,” died February 15, 2026, at 78. He gave the world PageMaker in 1985, putting the power of the printed page in the hands of anyone with a Mac and a LaserWriter. Aldus later merged with Adobe, and PageMaker eventually lead to InDesign. Printing historian Frank Romano posted a tribute video at WhatTheyThink worth five minutes of your time.