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Design Playgrounds
Palette builders, type playgrounds, background generators and gradient tools. Half of professional design is trying things quickly, and these are for trying things quickly.
20 sites
The proper colour wheel — analogous, triadic, split complementary — plus contrast checks for accessibility.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Full portfolio case studies in branding, illustration, photography and motion, with the sketches and process behind the finished work.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Turns a snippet of code into a tidy image with your choice of theme, font and window frame. The tool behind a lot of shared code screenshots.
- <1 min
- Desktop
A browser playground for HTML, CSS and JavaScript, plus an endless stream of other people's demos to open, read and remix.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Hand-picked four-colour palettes posted daily and sorted by mood, with none of a generator's randomness.
- <1 min
Palette generator trained on photographs and films, so the colours it suggests look like they came from somewhere real.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Generates hero images — gradients, particles, triangles, topography — at whatever resolution you need, free to download.
- <1 min
Hit the space bar for a five-colour palette, lock the ones you like, hit it again. The whole tool is that loop.
- <1 min
Builds a gradient visually and hands over the CSS, including the awkward multi-stop and radial cases.
- <1 min
Short shots of interface design, illustration and branding from designers around the world. A mood board that never quite ends.
- 10 min
Two dozen SVG generators in one place — noise, grain, blobs, dots, gradients, mesh — all exportable and all free.
- 10 min
Variable font sandbox where you drag the axes and watch weight, width and optical size move in real time.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Suggests font pairings from a model trained on type, with locks so you can hold one face and reroll the other.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Small library of ready-made gradients you nudge by dragging the angle, then copy straight into a stylesheet.
- <1 min
Generates blobs, waves, stacked layers and low-poly grids as SVG, all of them tweakable and all free to export.
The old-school colour scheme designer: one wheel, a live preview page, and far more control than the modern tools.
- 10 min
- Desktop
SketchFlow
AltFAn infinite canvas for rough diagrams and flows. Opens instantly with nothing to configure and no file to save first.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Extrudes type into three dimensions, wraps it round shapes and lets it drift, exporting the result as a loop.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Infinite squared paper for sketching layouts and floor plans, with snapping and nothing else getting in the way.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Renders your text in every font installed on the machine at once, which is the fastest way ever devised to pick one.
- <1 min
- Desktop
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Design Playgrounds: questions
How many sites are in Design Playgrounds?
20 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 1 of them is an AltF original that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
20 of the 20 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
8 of 20 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 20 are safe for work and 20 work with the sound off.