Design Arsenal

Everyone who has ever designed something in Photoshop or Illustrator knows that there's no avoiding of folders with countless font files, icons, and other items just dumped there. Fortunately, Design Arsenal addresses this issue and completely eliminates the need for that folder. The software lets you explore a wide range of design elements and it sends the ones you need directly to your projects. You can immediately import fonts, icons and backgrounds, without the need for that one folder where everything will be mixed up into a giant mess.

The software is available for Windows and Mac OS X, and it comes in Standard and Pro editions. Its components are distributed in a ZIP archive, so you only need to extract them and run the executable, but you have to make sure you have MS Visual C++ 2013 installed if you're running it on Windows.

Design Arsenal's user interface feels like a lightweight web browser with no address bar. You can explore fonts, icons and backgrounds on separate tabs, where they're displayed as clear as possible. Fonts sets are presented as samples on colored backgrounds, which can give you a good idea on how they would look in your own project. You may click a font to see all its variations, on the same interface, as well as a full glyphs table. Right-clicking the font and selecting an option is all it takes to export the font to a local folder, but you can also click a switch to install it on your system immediately.

Icons and backgrounds can be explored just like fonts. There are numerous sets placed at your disposal, and you can either scroll down the page or use the available filtering options to show specific icon packs or collections. The best part is that you can send individual icons to new or existing SVG file with a single click, but you can also copy their SVG code or just click and drag individual icons from the user interface over to a folder or directly into an active project.

The software provides you with various images, which you can use as backgrounds or shape fillers. You can inspect them separately and copy them to the clipboard or just drag them and drop them to wherever you need, just like the icons. The images are categorized into several folders, and you can also use a search function to find the ones you need instantly.

With Design Arsenal on your computer, you can say "goodbye" to that messy design elements folder, where everything is just dumped into a massive heap of files.