✨ Beautiful

Fly out through a mapped model of our stellar neighbourhood until the Sun is one unremarkable dot among thousands.

The largest archive of 360 panoramas anywhere, pinned to a world map and free to browse, covering plenty of places no Street View car reached.

Grant Sanderson's maths lessons, plus the written versions of the animations that made linear algebra look like geometry.

Photographic essays on ruined institutions that are far more interested in why the places closed than in the broken glass.

Guided write-ups of the city's empty hospitals, airfields and amusement parks, complete with directions and a note on the fence situation.

The proper colour wheel — analogous, triadic, split complementary — plus contrast checks for accessibility.

Aerial 360 panoramas shot from helicopters and drones over volcanoes, cathedrals and Antarctic ice, most of them enormous files worth the wait.

Type your address and spin the globe back 750 million years to see where that ground sat, and which ocean was sitting on top of it.

Modern tracker with a genuinely good interface, per-episode progress and an open API a great many other tools build on.

A calm, ad-free space where artists and researchers gather links, images and notes into shared channels. Follow one thread and an hour disappears.

Botanical infinite zoom drifting through flowers, insects and quiet ruins. Best left running on a second screen.

Generates a genuinely handsome natal chart and flags the rarer patterns, with celebrity charts on hand to compare against.

One astronomy image a day since 1995, each with a paragraph from an actual astronomer and an archive going back decades.

A gazetteer of the world's odd corners — bone chapels, abandoned observatories, restaurants built inside caves.

The industry's awards site, and the fastest way to find out what the ambitious end of web design is doing this month.

The sister site, strong on anime and historical portrait makers, with an unreasonable and very welcome number of hair options.

Engineering essays with live diagrams you drag — gears, lenses, GPS, sound — each the clearest thing ever written on its subject.

Full portfolio case studies in branding, illustration, photography and motion, with the sketches and process behind the finished work.

Centuries of natural history books scanned page by page, including illustrations nobody has looked at in decades.

Sculpt a glossy blob with sliders for noise, light and iridescence, then leave it rotating and admire your handiwork.

Eleven absurd brushes — blobs, tentacles, exploding dots — that make the composition decisions for you the moment you move.

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.

Anime avatar makers with genuinely good line art, including versions that output something usable as a profile picture.

How far you can get by train from any European station in five hours, drawn as coloured bands. Ruinous for an afternoon's productivity.

Renders every road in any city as white lines on black and nothing else, which turns an ordinary street plan into unexpectedly good art.

A global membership devoted to looking up, with a cloud of the day and a manifesto against blue-sky thinking.

Match hue, saturation and complementary colours against a target, one exercise at a time, scored out of a hundred.

Hand-picked four-colour palettes posted daily and sorted by mood, with none of a generator's randomness.

Palette generator trained on photographs and films, so the colours it suggests look like they came from somewhere real.

Generates hero images — gradients, particles, triangles, topography — at whatever resolution you need, free to download.

Hit the space bar for a five-colour palette, lock the ones you like, hit it again. The whole tool is that loop.

Chain encoders and classical ciphers together and watch text transform between formats at each step.

The charting tool most newsrooms quietly rely on, free at the sizes any one person will ever need.

Over a hundred thousand high-resolution scanned maps, georeferenced and free to zoom into more or less indefinitely.

Google's hallucinating network turned into a service, still perfectly capable of putting dog faces into absolutely everything.

A weekly newsletter of thoughtful links on design, technology and cities, with every past issue readable on the site without signing up.

A graphing calculator good enough that people make art with it — type a function and drag its parameters about.

Machine learning journal where every paper is an interactive diagram; publication has stopped, the back catalogue has not aged.

Turns any image into one-bit dithered grain, with a choice of classic algorithms and a two-colour palette picker.

Serious dithering workbench with dozens of algorithms, custom palettes, live preview and a video mode as well.

Hundreds of dress-up games covering mythology, history and fandoms, drawn by actual artists rather than an asset pipeline.

Pixel canvas designed for thumbs first, fed by a huge stream of daily themed drawings from a mostly Japanese community.

Short shots of interface design, illustration and branding from designers around the world. A mood board that never quite ends.

A rotating globe with every wind current on Earth drawn as moving lines, and layers underneath for ocean currents, particulates and the jet stream.

Nature recordings from named places with coordinates attached, so you know exactly which rainforest you are sitting in.

The carbon intensity of the grid across most of the world, coloured by how clean each country's electricity happens to be at this minute.

A fantasy city builder with elves, humans and a genuine research tree, played entirely in a browser tab and unusually pretty.

Upload a photograph and it rebuilds the entire thing out of emoji, colour-matched one tile at a time.