Tonnes of graphic design resources and tools that can assist you be even more creative are right at your fingertips. Are you looking for vectors? Or stock images? How about trendy and unique fonts? Or perhaps a little bit of inspiration? It’s all within reach — particularly if you know where to go.
Save a lot of time and needless web wandering with this guide to the absolute best graphic design resources and tools for designers and enthusiasts alike. Whatever your project, you’ll find the resources you need.
Free Stock Images
As any graphic designer will say, some projects are not finished until there is some decent accompanying photography. Pictures of people in a number of different situations or city landscapes can add in that extra something.
Here is a snapshot of our favourite free stock image sites to browse and enjoy. However designers, make sure that you keep a record of where you sourced each stock picture from for reference in the future.
Nappy
Nappy was founded to speak to the traditional stock photo sites that were previously lacking in diversity. An indispensable resource for any creative, all of Nappy’s images are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero agreement which give you peace of mind.
Moose
Providing stock photos by a “movie-scale crew”, Moose offers you options of people, ethnicity, style, fashion and a whole lot more. A handy category list and search box assists you with narrowing down what you need. We especially like the background imagery – there is plenty to choose from.
StockSnap
One of the original sites and still one of the absolute best, StockSnap is continuing to expand its most brilliant range of free stock imagery. It’s always very interesting to see what photographs are “trending”. It seems anything to do with beauty and nature is proving popular with the creative community.
Free Illustrations
Humaaans
In Humaaans, Pablo Stanley has put together something quite special: modular, vector illustrations of humans that you are able to mix, match, rotate as well as position to put together your own designs. Whatever you make is free for both business as well as personal use.
UnDraw
Calling itself as “open-source illustration for any idea that you can imagine and create”, unDraw is a continuously updated design project by Katerina Limpitsouni. UnDraw feature beautiful SVG images that you can utilise completely free and without attribution. We especially love the ability to quickly add your own hex code so that you can tailor the illustrations to your own projects.
Free Icons
Noun Project
Co-created by Sofya Polyakov, Edward Boatman and Scott Thomas, The Noun Project brings together a little over two million curated icons. These icons were created by a global community and are also available for use by designers for free.
Ionicons
Ionicons are premium icons for usage by designers in web, iOS, Android and desktop apps. Constructed by the Ionic Framework team, they’re all free and open source.
Simple Icons
Founded by Dan Leech, Simple Icons makes free SVG icons for popular brands available to download for free.
Open Peeps
Do you need something that is a little bit more hand-drawn? Open Peeps is the illustration collection for you. Established by Pablo Stanley, the open-source flat SVG and PNG assets are available for Sketch, Figma, Studio as well as XD. You can even make a donation if you have the ability to support Pablo. A little goes a long way.
Fonts
Fonts are by far the most vital part of the online world. However there is a lot of confusion regarding the laws that govern the usage of fonts. It is always better to utilise fonts from a trusted free online font generator to avoid legal issues.
Font Squirrel
Font Squirrel is one of the very best resources for free, hand-picked and high-quality fonts for commercial use. In addition, they have a cool Font Identifier which lets you identify any font online.
Google Fonts
Google Fonts is another quite famous library of licensed font families, an interactive web directory, and APIs for expediently using the fonts via CSS and Android. All their 1003 fonts are free and open source.
