Resources

Stay sharp.

Welcome to Husani’s all-in-one creative resource: the sites, tools, schools and programs I recommend to my mentees and keep coming back to myself.

Design & Visual Culture

Look at great things until your standards rise on their own.

Branding & Identity

Marks, wordmarks, and the arguments they start.

Type & Typography

For everyone who spots kerning crimes in the wild.

UX, UI & Product Design

Where pretty meets useful, and both take notes.

Design Tools & Utilities

The workbench. Mostly free. All sharp.

Figma Where interfaces, and most other things, get designed now.
Photopea Photoshop in the browser, free. Every student should know it exists.
Adobe Fonts The professional type library that comes with Creative Cloud.
Google Fonts Free, open-source type. This site runs on system Helvetica, but I still browse.
WhatTheFont Identify any typeface from a photo.
Type Scale Build a typographic hierarchy that actually holds.
Coolors Palette generation at the speed of the spacebar.
Adobe Color Color wheels, harmonies and palette extraction.
Colour Contrast My favorite for accessibility checks. Check your ratios before accessibility checks you.
Eye Dropper Grab any color from any page in your browser.
Unsplash Free photography that doesn’t look free.
Pexels Free photos and stock video for comps and decks.
The Noun Project An icon for everything, drawn properly.
Envato Templates, mockups, motion assets and stock, all in one subscription.
TinyPNG Crush image weight before your site pays for it.
Squoosh Google’s in-browser image compressor, with side-by-side proof.
MyEdit Free AI image upscaling that punches above its price.
remove.bg Background removal in one click.
GSAP The web’s animation engine of choice.
Poly Haven Free HDRIs, textures and 3D models, all CC0.
Haikei Generate SVG backgrounds, blobs and waves.
Ezgif Quick GIF and video conversions in the browser.
HandBrake The free video transcoder that just works.
Happy Hues Color palettes shown in real context.
Huemint AI color palettes generated for real layouts.
unDraw Open illustrations you can recolor to brand.
Heroicons Clean MIT-licensed icons from the Tailwind team.
Film Grab Cinematography stills for reference decks.
Artvee Public-domain classical art, downloadable.
Public Work Search 100,000+ public-domain images fast.
Coverr Free stock video for the hero section.
Freesound A community-built library of free audio.
Mockup World Free photorealistic mockups, organized.
Data Viz Project Every chart type, named and explained.
Datawrapper Newsroom-grade charts without code.

AI & Creative Tools

Use the machines. Keep the taste.

Claude Anthropic’s assistant. Deep reasoning and the best writer of the bunch.
Claude Code The agentic coding tool: give it a goal and it plans, builds and ships.
ChatGPT The generalist. Concepting sparring partner and everyday utility.
Gemini Google’s model family. Strong for research and multimodal work.
Perplexity Sourced answers for research, and for catching the other models’ hallucinations.
NotebookLM Feed it your research; it hands you back a briefing.
Midjourney Still the taste leader for image generation.
Ideogram Image generation that can actually set type.
Recraft Generation built for designers: vectors, mockups and brand assets.
Krea Real-time generation, editing and upscaling playground.
MyEdit Free AI image upscaling and enhancement. In my regular rotation; hard to beat the price.
Runway The film school of AI video.
Higgsfield Cinematic AI video and motion control. I use it for campaign visualization.
Luma Dream Machine Fast, dreamlike text-to-video.
ElevenLabs Voice generation good enough to fool your mother.
Suno Full songs from a prompt. Scary. Useful.
Base44 Vibe-code full web apps from a prompt.
v0 Vercel’s UI generator. Prompt to production React.
Lovable Full-stack apps from plain English.
Cursor The AI-native code editor.
Motionsites A gallery of the web’s best motion-driven sites.
n8n Node-based automation and the quiet backbone of agentic systems. Visual, self-hostable, agent-ready.
Model Context Protocol The open standard that wires agents to tools and data. Learn it once, use it everywhere.
LangGraph Developer-grade orchestration for stateful, multi-step agents.
Ollama Run open models locally. Free to experiment, private by default.
Hugging Face The open-source AI commons.
Ben’s Bites The daily AI digest worth its inbox space.
There’s An AI For That The directory for the tool you don’t know exists yet.
ComfyUI Node-based control over image generation.
Lexica A search engine for AI images and their prompts.
Meshy Text and images in, 3D models out.
Lummi AI-generated stock that doesn’t look it.

Trends & Culture

Where culture goes before it goes everywhere.

Advertising & Craft

The work that made you want to do this work.

Schools & Programs

The long roads. I’ve walked a few of them.

Parsons School of Design My MPS in Communication Design. Rigorous, conceptual, worth it.
School of Visual Arts I taught a creative methodology class here, and took five continuing-ed courses of my own, from Integrated Advertising to Advanced Photoshop.
Miami Ad School Where I did the Creative Director Program. The industry’s portfolio-school standard.
AdHouse NYC Small classes taught by working New York creatives. I studied here too.
Chicago Portfolio School A respected Midwest portfolio school building art directors, copywriters and designers for the industry.
VCU Brandcenter The most respected advertising grad program in the country.
Carnegie Mellon Design The gold standard for design research and human-computer interaction.
SCAD Massive resources, strong industry pipeline, every design discipline under one roof.
ArtCenter College of Design West-coast craft powerhouse for advertising and design.
Pratt Institute Brooklyn’s design institution.

Certificates & Short Courses

Shorter roads. Still uphill.

MIT xPRO I took the Agentic AI for Organizational Transformation program here.
Oxford Artificial Intelligence Programme Where I studied the strategy side of AI.
Future London Academy Where I did the Creative Leadership Program.
NYU Tandon Where I studied UX design principles for AR and VR.
Google UX Design Certificate The most accessible on-ramp into UX.
NN/g UX Certification The industry’s most credible UX credential.
IDEO U Design thinking from the people who named it.
Interaction Design Foundation Deep, affordable UX coursework by subscription.

Community & Mentorship

Nobody does this alone. I didn’t.

MAIP The 4A’s multicultural pipeline into advertising. I served as creative director for its Alumni Association.
BLAC Building Leaders and Creators: developing the next generation of diverse talent.
100 Roses From Concrete The premier network for creatives of color in advertising, marketing and media. I mentor through its programs.
ONE School The One Club’s free portfolio program for Black creatives.
ADCOLOR Championing diverse talent across the industry.
AIGA The professional association for design.
One Club Education Workshops, boot camps and student programs from the One Club.

Me, Elsewhere

The feeds I actually feed.

Husani BarnwellSee the work →