50 free resources for your graphic design projects
50 free resources for your graphic design projects
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Written by Anthony Wood on
If you happen to be short on funds right now or have been handed a tight budget by a cash-strapped client, there are many free design resources that can help you out.
We're talking free fonts, templates and mockups or vector illustrations, stock photography, icons and even videos – all the essential assets you might need to complete your projects without costing a penny. And they're all of the highest quality, too – freebies don't mean you have to compromise.
To make life easier for you, our designers and teachers at Shillington have collaborated with the Creative Boom team once again to bring you this comprehensive list of recommended resources, which you can download for free (at time of writing).
Free stock images
1. Pexels
As far as free stock photo sites go, we think Pexels is one of the best. With a community of photographers and videographers generously donating their work for everyone to download and use, royalty-free, it's also the first to respond to current affairs, providing the images we might need to illustrate our timely projects.
2. StockSnap
Known for its high-quality offering of free stock imagery, StockSnap has a whole host of different categories you can browse through, so you'll never struggle to find what you need. No credit is required but always welcome.
3. Landing Stock
Landing Stock is a niche site providing free stock photos that are suitable for your website landing page. Created by London-based product designer Craig Barber, it features only high-quality, clean and minimalistic photos, that crop well and provides space for copy.
4. Nappy
As creators, it's our duty to ensure our work is diverse and inclusive, representing the whole of society. Nappy is a relative newcomer to the free stock photo sites out there, bringing "beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people, for free".
5. Photo Creator
Want a photo for your site that no one else has? Photo Creator from Icons8 allows you to combine different stock photos to create your own unique image. Combine objects, people, backgrounds and even images of your own using a browser-based drag-and-drop interface that's very quick and easy to use. We especially love the way you can add filters to your search.
Free illustrations
6. Drawkit
DrawKit is a collection of free, beautiful, customisable MIT licensed SVG illustrations in two styles, to use on your next website, app, or project.
7. Humaaans
In Humaaans, Pablo Stanley has created something quite special: modular, vector illustrations of humans that you can mix, match, rotate and position to create your own designs. Whatever you make is free for both commercial and personal use.
8. UnDraw
Describing itself as "open-source illustration for any idea you can imagine and create", unDraw is a constantly updated design project by Katerina Limpitsouni featuring beautiful SVG images that you can use completely free and without attribution. We particularly love the ability to quickly add your own hex code to tailor the illustrations to your own projects.
9. Open Peeps
Need something a little more hand-drawn? Open Peeps is the illustration library for you. Created by Pablo Stanley, the open-source flat SVG and PNG assets are available for Sketch, Figma, Studio, and XD. You can even make a donation if you're able to support Pablo. A little goes a long way.
10. Lukasz Adam Free Illustrations
Lukasz Adam is an independent web designer who's made a bunch of high-quality vector art illustrations and icons available for free. They can be used for personal and commercial projects.
Free icons
11. Noun Project
Co-founded by Sofya Polyakov, Edward Boatman and Scott Thomas, The Noun Project brings together over two million curated icons, created by a global community and available for use by designers for free.
12. Ionicons
Ionicons are premium icons for use by designers in web, iOS, Android and desktop apps. Built by the Ionic Framework team, they're all free and open source.
13. Simple Icons
Started by Dan Leech, Simple Icons makes free SVG icons for popular brands available to download for free.
14. Icons
This fabulous resource courtesy of icons8.com gives you a whole library of free icons in PNG and SVG. They're on the ball, too, as they've just released a "coronavirus related searches" section for those of you requiring something very current.
15. Animaticons
Animaticons is a set of high-resolution animated GIFs that you can customise. They are small in file size, compatible with all major browsers, emails, and smartphones and don't require any special plugins or libraries.
Free fonts
16. Google Fonts
An intuitive and robust directory of open source web fonts for designers to use how they wish. All created to the high standards you'd expect from a web giant like Google.
17. Use & Modify
A personal selection of "classy, punk, professional, incomplete, and weird typefaces", Use & Modify provides open-source fonts that are free to use and...you guessed it, modify.
18. Fontfabric
Fontfabric is a digital type foundry that creates retail fonts and custom typography for various brands. Rather generously, they also provide a selection of free fonts for anyone to download and use. We love Nexa and Intro, but there are lots more to browse and sample on its nicely designed website.
19. Dafont
Dafont is an enormous archive of freely downloadable fonts. Browse by alphabetical listing, by style, by author or by popularity.
20. Font Squirrel
Another extensive archive of free fonts, all free for commercial use.
Free stock videos
21. Coverr
Coverr is a source of beautifully shot stock videos that are free to download for commercial and non-commercial use, no attribution required.
22. Mixkit
Brought to you by Envato, Mixkit is a curated gallery of high-quality videos and animation, made by some of the world's most talented creators, with all content licensed for free.
23. Videezy
Free HD stock footage and 4K videos courtesy of Videezy. Calling itself one of the largest video communities in the world, its collection is provided by its members – most is free to download and use, but there are some paid options, too, should you wish to extend your search.
24. Life of Vids
Life of Vids offers free videos for web designers, filmmakers, advertisers, agencies, or anyone else who can make use of them. You can create infinite loops with most of them, and they're all available to download for both personal and commercial use.
25. Videvo
Videvo offers a ton of free stock videos which can be used free of charge, in both personal and commercial productions. Video clips that carry the Creative Commons 3.0 license must be attributed to the original author.
videvo.net/stock-video-footage
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