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We're always on the lookout for hot new web design tools that can save you some precious time and improve your workflow. Every stage of building a website is covered this month, from planning your layout, creating colour schemes and adding animations to making user documentation and optimising search engines. Read on for the best web design tools of May 2019. 01. Startup 3 Build a Bootstrap site using a visual interface If you like Bootstrap, this tool from Designmodo could be a good option for you – it’s an online app with built-in templates and themes for building websites based on Bootstrap 4 with a 12-column grid. Sites are built using a drag-and-drop generator, so you can put everything together without coding but you do need a basic understanding of HTML and CSS to complete the process of creating a site. Startup will export your static HTML, CSS and JS files so you can upload them to your hosting provider. 02. Figma Plus Find and install useful plugins for Figma Figma Plus is the unofficial plugin system for Figma that lets you download and install third party plugins from within the Figma UI. The tool installs on Mac and Windows Figma desktop apps and you can also use it with Chrome browser. The intention is for the community to create and share plugins, but to get things started the team behind Figma Plus have built 11 useful new plugins so that there are things to play with if you install the system today. You can find out more in the release notes. 03. Sidedoor Speak to engineers inside companies you would like to work for If you’re getting frustrated with recruiters, Sidedoor offers an alternative approach to finding a job by putting you directly in touch with engineers at companies that fit your criteria so you can talk about the role with someone on the inside. Based on your conversation, the referrer decides whether they want to put you forward for a position at their company. This process is hopefully more efficient as it quickly gives both sides a good understanding of whether the position is right for you. For a more traditional approach to finding a job, you can check our listings of the best web design jobs from around the world. 04. Interplay Collaborative prototype-building that works with all your usual tools Interplay is a flexible prototyping system that you can use to plan layouts and even your design system. You can work in the online or desktop app and your changes are automatically saved to the cloud for easy collaborative working. Interplay has its own component-creation tools but a major boon is that it’s compatible with lots of other software and systems – you can import things from Sketch, Figma or InVision Studio, and you can synchronise React, Angular and Vue code components. 05. UserGuiding 2.0 Create interactive manuals for your users Create interactive user manuals for your products without writing any code – UserGuiding helps you to attract and retain users by making it easy for them to understand what your app does and how to use it. Your manuals might be for user onboarding or to get employees up to speed, either way there are many known benefits to communicating effectively, including reduced support costs and increased conversions. The latest version has a number of extra features and improvements based on customer requests that make it even easier to create your product tours. 06. Found Color Palettes based on colour combinations found in the wild Creating interesting colour palettes is hard, and we never get tired of novelle ways of doing it. This site extracts dominant hues from photographs that are pleasing to look at because of their colours – most of the images depict shadowy corners, street furniture, bins and other miscellanea that happen to have appealing colour combinations. The result is an archive of naturally-occurring palettes that aren’t generated by rules or algorithms, and don't necessarily follow colour theory. 07. CSSFX Simple CSS effects to beautify your interface Subtle CSS animations can be an effective yet understated way to make your interfaces easier to understand and more pleasant to use. This site has a collection of small animations that you can use to give feedback when an interface element is clicked or hovered over – just select the ones you want and the CSS code is copied for you. They are fully open source so you can use them as you please. 08. Backlinks Find out who links to your competitors' websites Put any URL into Backlinks and it shows you who links to it, so you can compare your own link situation to that of your competitors. You can see who is linking to your competitor and not to you, which gives you a picture of what you need to work on to improve your search engine rankings. You can also organise links according to factors like anchor text, domain score, page score and .edu and .gov domains. The results can be exported to CSV for further analysis. This might sound like paid-for data, but it’s a free tool. 09. Helvetica Now Re-engineered letterforms for the modern world Helvetica has been going strong for many years, but as an older typeface there are some aspects of it that aren’t suited so well for modern usage. A few years ago it was decided that a reboot was necessary to bring the typeface up to date and the result is Helvetica Now. Every single character has been redrawn and refitted so that it works in every situation, from the tiny text on a mobile device to an advert on the side of a bus. It’s available in three sizes, Micro, Text, and Display, each of which is specially tailored to be used at a different scale. Read more with our post on Helvetica Now. 10. Colour Review Find out contrast values for your colour scheme When putting together a colour scheme, it’s important to ensure that there is sufficient contrast between colours so that text is easy to read – this makes your site legible for people with a visual impairment and more effective for all users. This site is useful because you can input HSL, CMYK and RGB colour values and there are guides that tell you where different contrast boundaries lie on a given colour plane. It also helps you to ensure that you hit WCAG standards. Read more: 10 new web design tools for April 2019 8 Google Chrome extensions to make your life easier Cool CSS animation examples to recreate View the full article

BT has trademarked its new logo, which it plans to roll out later this summer, and at first glance, we were decidedly underwhelmed. It seems we're not alone, either, as the rebrand has faced pretty widespread ridicule on Twitter. The new logo design is similar to one the company trademarked in 2016, which was also a circle containing its name, and differs only in its use of colours. This newer version of the logo could still change, however, as BT's employees are being "consulted on the detail," according to a BT spokesperson. The current BT logo focuses on a connected globe London studio Red&White created the new logo, and while it is easy to call it yet another example of logos paring back until they're almost non-existent – Burberry springs to mind – it's also worth considering whether this is actually a very clever move. And when you view the logo in action – as in the video below – it starts to make a lot more sense. By stripping back any element of what the company actually does and focusing solely on the name, BT is demonstrating absolute confidence in its brand and in itself. And as the company has expanded to cover several remits – mobile, internet and TV – this logo cleverly leaves room for further expansion. It also allows customers to make up their own mind about what that brand means to them – although so far, the response has not been good. There was talk of blandness... Talk of MS Word (and MS Paint, naturally)... The inevitable comparison with other brands... And other brands also joined in on the slating, with Poundland stating it had also updated its logo... costing a whole £1 and looking "just like" BT's. It's even gone as far as to update its Twitter image with the new design. But of course, there were also those who took a little more balanced view. It's also important to remember that logos are just one part of a wider identity, and viewing a single, black-and-white logo in isolation is unlikely to inspire at the best of times. We're intrigued to find out more behind this rebrand, and look forward to seeing more of the design in context. (Not, you understand, that we'll necessarily be switching to BT anytime soon.) Read more: All hail the new Uber logo 5 brilliant brand collaborations (and what you can learn from them) 9 agencies to follow on Instagram View the full article

From a zero day flaw in WhatsApp, to Patch Tuesday fixes, Threatpost breaks down the top vulnerabilities of this week. View the full article

The bloom is on mobile, whether it be the enterprise, employees or the cybercriminals plotting new ways to slip past a corporate defenses in a post-parameter world. View the full article

The vendor also issued a patch schedule for the still-unpatched bug in its Secure Boot trusted hardware environment, which affects most of its enterprise and SMB portfolio, amounting to millions of vulnerable devices. View the full article

Google is offering free replacements for its Titan Security Key after discovering a misconfiguration in its pairing protocols. View the full article

Here are 10 top takeaways from Intel's most recent class of Spectre-like speculative execution vulnerabilities, disclosed this week. View the full article

You're reading 2 Ways to Add Interactive Hotspots to Postcards Email Templates, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook! Adding an interactive hotspot to your email’s image is a wonderful idea. It can significantly improve clickthrough conversions if your subscribers can click on the items you’re referring to in your copy. Additionally, these interactive hotspots can be an innovative … View the full article

Microsoft Patch Tuesday security bulletin tackles 22 critical vulnerabilities. View the full article

A massive update addresses the breadth of the computing giant's product portfolio. View the full article

Intel has disclosed a new class of speculative execution side channel attacks. View the full article

Adobe has issued patches for 87 vulnerabilities on Patch Tuesday - the bulk of which exist in Adobe's Acrobat and Reader product. View the full article

The bug is remotely exploitable without authentication or user interaction. View the full article

WhatsApp has patched a vulnerability that allowed attackers to install spyware on victims' phones. View the full article

The two high-severity bugs impact a wide array of enterprise, military and government networks. View the full article

A Twitter glitch "inadvertently" leaked iOS users' location data to an unnamed partner. View the full article

In its latest observed campaign, there were also overlaps in victimology with the DarkHotel APT. View the full article

Using a bug patched in March, the attacks are starting to ramp up worldwide. View the full article

From a creepy Airbnb incident to Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report, Threatpost editors break down the top privacy and security stories for the week ended May 10. View the full article

The WannaCry attack proved pivotal, changing the way organizations go about securing their environments. View the full article

Nvidia has patched three vulnerabilities in its Windows GPU display driver that could enable information disclosure, denial of service and privilege escalation. View the full article

Nigerian scam groups launched even more attacks in 2018 - and used more complex types of malware to reach more victims. View the full article

A video interview and Q&A with IoT specialist Dan Demeter of Kaspersky Lab. View the full article

Alpine Linux Docker images available via the Docker Hub contained a critical flaw allowing attackers to authenticate on systems using the root user and no password. View the full article

Drupal, Typo3 and Joomla are all impacted by the bug. View the full article