Snippets: October 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.

It Belongs in a Museum!

The Last Museum is a massive search engine for museum art, with over six million works currently indexed. You can search for art by theme, style, subject, or mood, or browse art by a specific artist, culture, or timespan. The site—which is free to use—and provides download links for art in the public domain has plans to eventually index all museum art worldwide. 

Moving Type

Indulge your typographic soul and your inner six-year-old with Kelli Anderson’s beautifully imagined Alphabet in Motion book. This pulp-and-parchment masterpiece explores letterforms—and their history—through ingenious paper engineering, featuring an interactive cover and pages full of pop-up mini sculptures. The giant volume demonstrates the technologies and philosophies that have shaped letters over time. 

Vintage Visual Buffet

If you’re looking for a creative boost, look no further than the Ephemera Society of America’s website. It is a treasure trove of vintage visual material, from ads, labels, cards, and posters to maps, packaging, photographs, and more. Its extensive collection offers a fascinating look at the typography, illustration, techniques, and design styles of earlier eras, broken down
by category. 

A Palatable Palette 

Tired of the same old mathematically generated color schemes? You might find Pigment by ShapeFactory to be a rejuvenating feast for the eyes. This sleek, single-page tool eschews the algorithms to create vibrant, harmonious color combinations based on lighting and pigment. You can use simple tools to adjust tones and easily export them as Adobe Swatch Exchange, SVG, or Sketch files. It’s also slickly integrated with ShapeFactory’s tools for making gradients and duotones. Did we mention it’s all completely free to use? 

Make It Smol

Smol is a macOS app for compressing and converting images, PDFs, video, audio, and other files without sending anything to the cloud. This Swiss Army knife for creative files uses visual analysis to preserve important details such as faces, text, and edges while aggressively shrinking less important areas. Other tools in its tiny arsenal include batch processing, format conversion, AI upscaling, and metadata removal. It’s a $29 one-time purchase with no subscriptions or quotas. 

A Preflight Companion          

Avellio adds a dedicated typography QA pass to InDesign, looking for problems that can easily slip past the built-in preflight. Avellio flags typography and layout issues such as style overrides, spacing and punctuation inconsistencies, awkward line breaks, widows and orphans, and rogue fonts, and then lets you review each finding before making changes. This extra set of “eyes” for those final, detail-oriented checks is a remarkable $40 a year for the solo designer or $70 for a lifetime license.