Vector magic! from the AI Research Lab at Stanford, because if there was ever a good use for AI it is to eliminate logo-pixelitis. I foresee this horrible problem being a thing of the past in as little as 1 generation! Much better results than Adobe or Corel’s trace tools. I’ve often spent long hours hunched over bezier curves, painstakingly fixing traced jpg logos. One company had a logo that was two fantastical trees surrounding a castle, which took me an unspeakable number of hours to fix. I still see traces of that logo on my retinas if I look at a black wall… Anyway, moving on!

All the science I can handle in conveniently prepackaged forms.

Spare but thorough thesaurus. I heart panlexicon* for exploring and expanding word/concept relationships during my brainstorming phase, but for writing essays I sometimes need a really serious thesaurus. The above thesaurus seems created specifically for writing rather than word-exploring. Most free online thesaurii give you the same 5 boring words for even the most complex concepts, so when I found the above link I bookmarked it so hard the whole internet shook.

Buy vs Rent calculator, (NYT login req) which is a marvelous piece of info design.** So easy to use and clear in its conclusions, you wouldn’t even notice it was designy until you compared it to all the other horrible, confusing, ugly home equity calculators. Yes, I do spend time comparing home equity calculators despite the fact that I don’t intend to buy a house.

Free fonts that are actually well-made. Some display faces, some text. I haven’t tried any of them out yet. District Thin and Diavolo look promising for display, OpenModerna looks like a Helvetica clone but could be useful where you need to have Helvetica with legal, free license for extensive use. Nonprofits, anyone?

*Created by Bec and a friend of hers. Full disclosure: Bec is my bestie but she did not ask me for a plug, I really do think pantextual is amazing.

**Beware: can cause panic and fainting in rare cases of homeownership.