I’m really impressed by Creative Market’s campaign to build a robust marketplace for designer-created tools for other designers. I’m not altogether convinced that there’s a huge business here, but I hope there is. Lots of smart, talented people turn to Creative Market to sell clever, useful solutions that make designers’ lives easier and more interesting — people should be able to make a living from that.
Granted, few of the design solutions are genuinely innovative or spectacular, and lots of them are redundant of one another. But even among the simplistic ones, there is really good stuff, like this Photoshop template for “Ultimate Identity Mockups.” It allows identity designers to quickly swap out concepts for logos and other assets in a photo realistic fashion, thanks to crafty use of Photoshop’s smart objects feature.
This is the kind of resource that just wouldn’t have been widely available a decade or two ago, and now we’re just a browser click away — what’s more, it costs an absurdly low US$9. You can hardly go wrong. While it’s true that Creative Market isn’t necessarily the catalyst for the proliferation of this kind of product, if they can convene an active, thriving marketplace around this emergent activity, many more interesting things are sure to happen.
(Full disclosure: Facebox, my pack of fifty royalty-free user avatars, is also available for sale on Creative Market.)
Update: Creative Market was acquired by Autodesk on 19 Mar 2014.
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