Whether you are a Designer, Writer or in advertising and communications or media and publishing industry, there’s no shortage of free design resources to help jumpstart your next project. Whether you’re short on funds and working on a side project, or have been handed a tight budget by a cash-strapped client, there are many free design resources that can help you out.
The following recommended sites include free design resources that are reliably high-quality and legitimately free to download. There are also resources in the sites for commercial use. Whether you’re after images or videos, icons or colour inspiration/choices, you’re sure to find what you’re looking for.
1. FREE STOCK IMAGES
Pixabay
Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright-free images and videos. All contents are released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist – even for commercial purposes.
Pexels
This is a free royalty site that gives quality photos and videos from other talented creators.
Unsplash
This is one of my top 3 free stock photo sources. Unsplash gives you free high-resolution photos, and also photos for commercial purposes.
Nappy
I only use Nappy for one reason, it provides high-resolution photos of BLACK and BROWN people only.
Stocksy
Stocvksy has options for selecting photos only or videos and photos for searches.
StyledStock
Pictures on StyledStock are FEMININE stock photos. They provide beautiful feminine-based pictures free and for commercial use, with blog posts on photography, fashion, and lifestyle.
StockSnap
StockSnap updates its images weekly and totally free. They also give analytics and sort photos by dates, trends or number of views.
2. FREE STOCK VIDEOS
Videvo
Videvo has one of the largest resources of free, safe-to-use video and audio content on the web. They provide high-quality free content on a regular basis, available for everyone to use.
Videezy
This is another high-quality free video resource. Videezy has stock footage and 4k quality videos in various categories one can browse through.
Coverr
Coverr was a side project by filmmakers, built in order to provide entrepreneurs with Free beautiful looking videos, for the products they were building.
Life Of Vids
LifeofVids also have a free high-resolution photography website, LifeofPix. Video creators also use this site to submit their videos for free and commercial use.
MotionPlaces
Motion Places provides creatives with free stock footage from around the world. The film, edit, and curate every clip to offer a simple, curated, and growing collection of beautiful video footage you can use. There are footages categorized based on places and themes.
Mixkit
At MixKit, you will find extraordinary stock video clips for your next project that are all HD, 1080p and completely free! You can download business clips to use as a b-roll in your next client project, find a great animation to drop into a music video or improve your website with some captivating drone footage as a background video.
3. FREE ICONS
Flaticon
FlatIcon is my first go-to site when looking for icons. This is one of the largest databases of free icons available in various formats (PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD)
Iconfinder
With Iconfinder you can subscribe to get access to their premium icons. But if you are no low budget, there are categories for their free resources or icons.
Ionicons
Ionicons also have premium designed icons for web or graphic designers use. With icons that are supported for SVG and web font.
Animaticons
Animaticons have animated GIFs that supports all web browsers, are small in file size and play automatically. Their resources are recommended for websites, presentations, emails, and more.
The Noun Project
TheNounProject has icons for almost “everything”. They are royalty-free icons and you can also customize your own icon to suit your needs.
Simple Icons
With SimpleIcon you can download free SVG icons directly from the website. Also, icons for popular brands are downloadable with their colour codes.
Streamlineicons
Streamline was created to enhance any project you’re working on. Doesn’t matter if it’s a website, a mobile app, or a slide deck.
4. FREE FONTS
1001fonts
Whenever I think of downloading new fonts for a new project, 1001fonts is the first site I check. They have several categories of fonts/typefaces which you can choose from and download for free.
Dafont
The fonts presented on Dafont are their authors’ property, and are either freeware, shareware, demo versions or public domain. Most times I find fonts that I can’t see in any other sites in Dafont.
Google Fonts
The process on Google Font is very simple and it offers an intuitive and robust collection of open source designer web fonts. One can share and integrate typography into any design project seamlessly.
Font Squirrel
Font Squirrel is one of the best resources for free, hand-picked, high-quality, commercial-use fonts.
Befonts
Befont has high-quality design resources for free. There is free font one can download and try before they buy. With beautiful script type, professional sans serif font and more.
Emotype
Emotypes groups different typefaces by the emotions they represent. For example, typeface grouped by Welcoming, Neutral, Confident, Unique, etc.
MyFonts
MyFonts offers one of the largest selection of professional fonts for any project. Although most of the fonts are not free, many at very affordable prices.
5. COLOUR INSPIRATION
Coolors
With Coolors, you can create beautiful colour schemes that always work together, pick up starting colours from your images and get the perfect combination automatically. You can browse great color schemes shared by creatives.
Adobe Color
Adobe Color is a perfect colour wheel you can always compare, complement or see shades of colours. You can also extract the colour code from the images you upload.
Paletton
This is another colour wheel resource you can fine-tune colours to create and share a palette. The super fast color schemes generator! Create, save and share perfect palettes in seconds! Start the Generator, it’s free! iOS App ·
Colourcode
Colourcode is an online designer tool, which allows you to easily and intuitively combine colours. It is a good tool for finding a colour scheme for your next design. One can pick colours based on HSL. Scheme-mode with monochromatic, analogic, complement, triad and quad colours.
Colordot by Hailpixel
Colordot is another perfect colour picker. The IOS is available for iPhone users. You can swipe left and right to change the colours hue.
Color Safe
You can generate colour palette for your next project with Color Safe. You get accessible text colours which are generated with WCAG Guidelines.
UIgradients
UIgradients is a handpicked collection of beautiful color gradients for designers and developers. Hex Color Codes can easily be extracted using the application.
6. FREE MOCKUP TOOLS
Freepik
Freepik is a source for free vectors, PSDs, icons, and photos. This is many designer’s first choices when looking for a resource that offers best high-quality content: illustrations, photos, icons, mockups, and presentations templates.
Placeit
Placeit is one of the largest collections of mockups on the Internet. It is also a great tool to easily create mockups. Just drop your design in & it will generate the mockup.
Mockup World
Mockup World is an online service that offers designers and web developers free access to hundreds of ready to use mockups! It handpicks and presents the best photorealistic Photoshop mockups that designers and agencies worldwide have published online.
SmartMockups
Smartmockups enables you to create stunning high-resolution mockups right inside your browser within one interface. This is one of the fastest web-based mockup tools.
Graphic Burger
GraphicBurger is a buffet of premium quality design resources offered for free to the community. It provides exclusive PSD files “cooked” in-house along with featured top-notch freebies from creatives around the world.
Mockplus
Mockplus is an all-in-one prototyping tool to create faster, smarter and easier prototypes with simple drag-and-drop, supporting mobile, web and desktop apps prototyping. It is available for free download on Windows & Mac OS and Android & iOS devices.
Freebiesbug
Freebiesbug is a web design blog showcasing free high-quality design resources like PSD files, HTML website templates, fonts, and other useful resources. It is a hand-picked resource for web designers and developers.
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