Finding premium resources to use in your design work actually means spending huge money. Not everyone can afford them, and as a designer, we should respect the work and efforts other creators put in their designs. That's why we always recommend new designers to look for free to use resources and follow trending design inspirations from the web.
A design process consists of many elements which in the end makes it a finish product. These elements could be Design templates, Pre-made Logo designs, Graphic Mockups, Icons, Fonts, Stock photos, Color palettes and many other form of resources which you can use in your project. Finding free to use license of these design resources is time consuming, but not to worry. We did our own research and come up with 6 websites of each design type, which offers free to use resources. It doesn't matter if you are a designer or a non-designer, creating every sort of design is not always possible. So we tend to buy or download these design assets from creative websites.
On these listed sites, you can find high-quality design resources that are free to download and use in your graphic software. Whether you're looking for images or videos, illustrations, mockups, plugins, fonts, or online design tools, you're sure to get what you're looking for. You can use these design resources in advertisement, marketing campaign, graphic design, or any other creativity related work. Read: 7 Process To Master Logo Designing In 2022
Read this article till last or you can click on these design resources type to skip directly to the given section. Click on any of the items to redirect to the point:
Graphic Mockups
What Is A Graphic Mockup?
A mockup is a model of a design or device, used for demonstration, product presentations or other purposes. A Product mockup is a graphic design template, think of it as a means of showing off your brand identity in a realistic way. Mockups reflect the design choices for color schemes, layouts, typography, iconography, and the visuals of navigation.
There are tons of mockup templates available to use for presenting your design on Business Cards, Mug, Billboard, Wall, Paper, Book, Fabric, Envelope, Handbag, Board sign, Box, Tags, T-Shirt, Gadgets etc. You can insert your own design on a graphic mockup with some little adjustments of perspective and colors.
6 Websites To Download Free Graphic Mockups
GraphicBurger - GraphicBurger is a marketplace of premium quality design resources offered for free to the community. On GraphicBurger, you’ll find exclusive downloadable PSD files, Mock-Ups, UI Kits, Icons, Text Effects, and Backgrounds. The licensing allows you to use and modify these images personally or commercially, but you may not resell, sublicense or redistribute the design files.
Pixeden - Pixeden is a great place to download high quality web resources. At Pixeden, you can download all the web and graphic design templates, and get access to all Premium files for free. Pixeden let users to download all free web and graphic design templates, and you can get access to all the Premium files from only $6 a month.
Mockplus - Mockplus is a cloud-based rapid prototyping tool, which developers can use for building interactive prototypes and wireframes. Mockplus have simple drag-and-drop options inbuilt to make interactive prototypes for mobile and web. Mockplus is an all-in-one online product design platform for designing, prototyping, collaboration and creating design systems.
Unblast - Unblast selects the best of the best and gathers the best design resources around the world in one place. At Uniblast, you get the best quality items which save you tons of searching hours. Unblast provide free resources for designers including Graphics, Fonts, Mockups, Icons and Templates in photoshop (PSD) and illustrator (AI) formats. You will also get access to exclusive resources of exceptional quality.
GraphicPear - GraphicPear is home for Premium and free quality design resources & assets for designers like Mockups, Fonts, Templates, Icons, Resumes, Infographics and other resources for designers. Here you can browse through and download tons of premium Mockup files. Here you can get exclusive design assets and resources on daily basis.
Mockupworld - Mockup World is the biggest source of providing free photo-realistic mockups with over hundreds of high-quality Photoshop files (PSDs). Mockup World features a large number of clean & high quality mockups such as Paper mockups, Picture frame mockups, Packaging mockups.
You can also get free graphic mockups from Iconfinder, Placeit, Freepik.
Color Palettes
What Are Color Palettes?
A color palette, in the digital world, refers to the full range of colors that can be displayed on a device screen or other interface. Color palette actually separate the color value of a design in the form of HEX color code and identifies the colors that complement one another. Color palettes are very useful when it comes to set a mood for a design.
Nobody wants to waste their time looking for a perfect color scheme that suits their design work. You can find many ready-made color palettes and gradients online which you can use in your design without actually putting much effort. That's where you can explore and generate free palettes based on your preferred color scheme from these listed websites.
6 Websites To Get Free Color Palettes
Canva - Canva is an online graphic design platform, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. The app includes templates for users to use. Canva has bunch of color palette ideas and a color palette generator, which you can use to create color combinations in seconds. Simply upload a photo, and it'll use the hues in the photo to create your palette.
ColorHunt - Color Hunt is an open collection of color palettes where creators can get color inspiration for design and art projects. This color palettes are being used by web developers, artists, illustrators, graphic designers, fashion designers, interior designers, marketers, and more. You can find color palettes related to schemes like Pastel, Vintage, Neon, Gold, Winter, Spring, Rainbow, Night, Space, Earth, Nature, and Wedding.
ColorSpace - On ColorSpace, you can find the perfect matching color scheme for your next project or generate nice color palettes, color gradients and much more! All you have to do is just enter a color, and it will generate satisfying Color Palettes for you. You can generate Generic Gradient, Matching Gradient, 3-Color-Gradient, Spot Palette, Twisted Spot Palette, Classy Palette, Shades, and Random Shades.
AdobeColor - Color by Adobe is a web app and creative community where you can create and share color schemes and inspiration. On AdobeColor, you can find the perfect matching color scheme for your next project and generate nice color palettes, color gradients and much more! Save schemes to your Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries to use in your favorite apps like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Photoshop Sketch.
MuzliColors - Muzli Colors is an online platform where designers can search, create and get inspired by thousands of color combination. Muzli Colors is used to generate beautiful Color Palette and Schemes that works. You can browse through and save tons of pre-generated color palettes, or create one by color combination.
Coolors - Coolors is the most loved color palettes app and website that inspires 2.5M+ creatives every day! Here you can generate or browse beautiful color combinations for your designs. Add or remove the number of colors from 2 to 10 · Type your own HEX codes to get. Designers can create, save and share beautiful palettes in seconds.
You can also generate free color palettes from Colormind, BrandColors, Paletton.
Stock Photos
What Are Stock Photos?
Stock images are generic photos, illustrations, artworks and icons created without a particular project in mind. They are then licensed for a fee, to individuals looking for such assets, to later use them in their design or project.
Usually stock images ranges between a few cents to over 100 of dollars. Their price varies based on what type of license your want for an image. But don't worry, there are also some websites that provides Royalty-free images which are completely free to download and use.
6 Websites To Download Free Stock Photos
Pexels - Founded in 2014, Pexels maintains a library of over 3.2 million free-to-use stock photos and stock footages. Pexels is home to almost every category of free stock photos & videos which you can use everywhere. You can browse and download millions of high-quality royalty free stock images & copyright free pictures. Pexels allow users to download their content without compulsory need to give them credit .
Pixabay - Owned by Canva, Pixabay is a place that provides copyright free images, videos and music. Pixabay is used for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, film footage, and music, exclusively under the custom Pixabay license. Pixabay allows the free use of the material with some restrictions. Giving credit to the artist on Pixabay is not necessary but is always appreciated by their community.
Unsplash - Owned by Getty Images, Unsplash is a website dedicated to sharing stock photography under the Unsplash license. Unsplash claims over 265,000 contributing photographers and generates more than 16 billion photo impressions per month on their growing library of over 3.5 million photos. You can browse beautiful photos that you can download and use for any project. The photos on Unsplash are free to use and can be used for most commercial, personal projects, and for editorial use. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or Unsplash, although it is appreciated when possible.
Burst - Burst is owned by ecommerce platform Shopify. Burst is a free stock photo platform famous for providing free stock photos for websites and commercial use. Their image library includes thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images that were shot by global community of photographers. The main goal of Burst is to provide designers, developers, bloggers and entrepreneurs with access to beautiful free stock photography.
Stockvault - Stockvault is a free stock photo community where photographers & artists can share their own creative photos and artwork with people from all over the world. On Stockvault, you get complete access to free stock photos, textures, backgrounds and graphics for your design project. You can download thousands of pictures and illustrations of people, animals, buildings, street photography, beautiful landscapes, plant & flower photos, objects from computers & electronics to food images and jewelry photos. All of Stockvault's stock images & vectors are 100% free and no attribution is required.
Pikwizard - Pikwizard is an online place which provides high-quality free images, videos & free stock photos for commercial or personal use. There are plenty of images that are available to use on Pikwizard without having to worry about copyright. PikWizard even allow you to use their images for any use, altered or otherwise. Pikwizard has 100,000+ high-quality images, with 20,000 of these completely exclusive to the site.
Design Inspiration
What Is Inspiration In Designing?
Design inspiration is a great way to get fresh, creative ideas and is a crucial part of the design process. Inspiration is a feeling of enthusiasm which also helps you to stay updated with current design trends. The more inspiration you get, the more diverse your creativity gets.
Also Read: Factors That Makes A Perfect Logo #3
In today's time nothing comes free, not even inspiration. Inspiration gives us the energy to create new designs and to work hard to ensure they fit with our image or vision. To stay updated about new and already existed design norms, designers keep on seeking on inspiration on design styles such as Logos, Patterns, Poster design, Typography, Backgrounds, Mockups etc.
6 Websites To Get Free Design Inspiration
Pinterest - Pinterest is an image sharing and social media platform designed to enable discovery of information on the internet using images, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pins. Pinterest consists mainly of "pins" and "boards". Pinterest is a powerhouse of over millions of creative content. You can find tons of design inspiration in every field or design method possible. You can follow your favorite content to interact with their new addition of creative work. There are informative image-pins, short videos, and idea pins on Pinterest which will surely going to provide some useful insight.
Dribbble - Dribbble is the leading destination to find & showcase creative work and home to the world's best designs where you discover top designers & creatives. Dribbble is a self-promotion and social networking platform for digital designers and creatives. Dribbble is a go-to place where designers gain inspiration, give feedback, explore community, and find jobs. Dribbble serves as a design portfolio platform with the best resources to discover and connect with designers worldwide.
DeviantArt - DeviantArt is an online art community featuring artwork, videography and photography, and a subsidiary of the company Wix. Launched in 2000, DeviantArt became a place where art and community thrive. On DeviantArt, you can explore over 350 million pieces of art while connecting to fellow artists and art enthusiasts. DeviantArt is still a popular platform among artists to get design inspirations or to showcase their work. DeviantArt is still among the top 200 websites online.
Artstation - ArtStation is a platform for artists to showcase their artwork. Motive of ArtStation is as same as DeviantArt-- To showcase creative work, but is doing a lot better than DeviantArt in terms of performance. The ArtStation App provides an awesome browsing and discovery experience, enabling you to view thousands of artworks by the world's best artists. However, ArtStation is more geared towards creatives who are interested in the games industry, film and entertainment. Many artists have found that having an ArtStation portfolio can help them get jobs with major game studios.
Awwwards - Awwwards is a professional web design and development competition website. It aims to recognize and promote the best of innovative web design and creative work. Awwwards are the Website Awards that recognize and promote the talent and effort of the best developers, designers and web agencies in the world. Awwwards brings you talks on User Experience, UI Design, Web Design and Development, Building Successful Digital Agencies, E-commerce, Animation.
Behance - Owned by Adobe, Behance is a social media platform with the world's largest creative network for showcasing and discovering creative work. Behance was founded by Matias Corea and Scott Belsky in November 2005. Behance was acquired by Adobe and now a place of over 10 million members. Behance is the leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work. The creative world updates their work in one place to broadcast it widely and efficiently.
MasterBundles - Are you tired of gathering useful information on graphic design from different websites? Then you should pay attention to MasterBundles! Thanks to the articles on this platform, you will always keep up with new trends and updates in visuals. MasterBundles is a golden ticket for both experienced and green designers as it provides an in-depth look at modern and creative elements in web design.
You can also get free design inspiration from Abduzeedo, Freepik, FreebiesBug.
Design Templates
What Are Design Templates?
Design templates are pre-made design assets that can be customized or altered for creative use. It is a file created with an overall layout to be used with one or more documents. Templates are often designed to meet specific standards or specs so they're consistent between users and mediums. You can use pre-designed templates from template libraries and websites or create custom templates for future use.
Design templates contain elements, typography, color schemes, and layout with custom formatting, and styled fonts for a particular look. When you apply a design template to your presentation, the slide master and color scheme of the new template replace the slide master and color scheme of the original presentation. You can get Photoshop (PSD) and Illustrator (AI) format templates of Posters, Flyers, Business cards, Wedding invitation, Resumes etc. that are ready to edit and use.
6 Websites To Download Free Design Templates
PSDgraphics - PSDgraphics is a go-to place to browse and download high resolution Backgrounds, Textures, PNG collections, and PSD icons for your web and graphic design project. Launched as a hobby site, PSDgraphics is an all-in-one place where you can find a lot of free stuff for webmasters and designers. Enjoy fully editable Photoshop PSD files and high resolution stuff like abstract backgrounds, textures and patterns, PSD icons and graphics, web design elements, Photoshop text and video tutorials, Photoshop recreations, etc.
Templatenet - Templatenet is a website designed for creators to get beautifully designed, easily editable templates to get their work done faster & smarter. Here you can simply Browse, Search, Save & Download Easy to use Templates. With templates.net you get thousands of free templates, designs, documents on everything you could need. They have poster templates, daily planner, wedding invitation, business cards, newsletter's, resumes all for free. You can also join their Pro Membership. Templatenet provides ready to download and use assets like Instagram Post, Vectors, Plans, Instagram Story, Logos, Flyers, Posters, YouTube Channel Art, Resumes, and other design types.
StockLayouts - StockLayouts is a graphic design and production company that creates and sells graphic design templates. Designers can easily search StockLayouts extensive library of beautiful graphic design templates for a wide variety of businesses. StockLayouts offers pre-designed, customizable page layout templates that include stock photos and original artwork for creating print marketing materials. It is the leading provider of graphic design templates for creating printed marketing materials.
PNGtree - Founded in December 2016, PNGtree is the world's biggest PNG assets provider which offers free download of PNG, PNG images, Backgrounds and Vector-- PSD, AI and EPS Files. Current PNGtree platform is home to more than 3 million high-quality PNG elements and 800,000 background material. You can download PNG Images, Backgrounds, Templates, PowerPoint Templates, and Illustrations.
FreePSDfiles - FreePSDFiles provide downloads of a great range of PSD templates created by themselves which are absolutely free. FreePSDFiles create Freemium (Free & Premium) PSD Files, PSD graphics, PSD Templates, PSD backgrounds, PSD business cards, PSD flyers and many PhotoShop resources. Here you get access of Free PSD Files, Templates, Graphics, Flyers and Business Cards which is free for personal and commercial use.
Lovepik - With over 10,000 creative design contributors around the world, Lovepik provides free download stock of PNG images, Powerpoint templates, photos, creatives, backgrounds and illustrations for your graphic design needs. Lovepik is a reliable royalty-free commercial images library which welcomes all the creators and designers around the world with a sharing, affordable, borderless philosophy.
Illustrations
What Is An Illustration?
An illustration is a decoration, interpretation or visual explanation of an idea or a concept. Illustrations are being used in Posters, Flyers, Films, Artworks, Books, Teaching materials, Animations and Video games. Illustrations can be made in the form of a drawing, painting or a printer work.
Illustrations are a modern approach to convey creative work in a unique way. They could be minimal, complex, or even made in the form of typography. An illustration is a visualization of things seen, remembered or imagined, using a graphical representation. Most famous style of illustration nowadays are Infographics, Retro and Futuristic.
6 Websites To Download Free Illustrations
Freepik - Freepik is an online marketplace which provides almost every kind of design resources out there. One of the best things that stands out about Freepik is that it provides premium looking designs completely free to use. Freepik provides more than 10 million graphic resources where you can find Photographs, PSDs, Illustrations and Vectors.
Openclipart - Openclipart, also called Open Clip Art Library, is an online media place of free to use vector clip art. With over 170,000+ Illustrations and clip arts, it became one of the largest community of artists making the best free original clipart for you to use for absolutely any reason.
UnDraw - UnDraw provides open-source illustrations for any idea you can imagine. UnDraw grants you a nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use the assets provided from unDraw for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the creator or unDraw.
VectorStock - VectorStock is a specialized stock agency specifically developed to offer the best Vector only images, Graphics, Icons & illustrations, Royalty free vector images, Vector art, Clipart, and High resolution stock images. All of the images on VectorStock site are Royalty-free. You can find and download the vectors you want.
Vecteezy - Vecteezy is a platform that offers millions of free vector graphics contributed by professional artists from all over the world. Here you can explore royalty-free vectors, clipart graphics, icons, stock photos, stock videos, backgrounds, patterns, banners, and designs from artists around the world. The Vecteezy contributor program allows designers and illustrators to make money by uploading creative content.
Craftwork - Craftwork is a marketplace of small team of designers and front-end developers who create high quality UX/UI toolkits, 3D graphics, Vector illustrations and Templates that will make your work faster and easy. You can find both paid as well as free to use illustrations on Craftwork.
Fonts
What Are Fonts?
A font is a set of printable or displayable text characters in a specific style and size that graphic designers use to put text on their images and videos. The type design for a set of fonts is the typeface and variations of this design form the typeface family. Each font is a matched set of type, unique in its own way and are formatted into Bold, Italic, and Regular.
Also Read: 10 Common Mistakes Designers Make #2
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Fonts come in all shapes and sizes and are classified into five basic of typefaces: serif, sans serif, script, monospaced, and display. As a general rule, serif and sans serif typefaces are used for either body copy or headlines, while script and display typefaces are only used for headlines.
6 Websites To Download Free Fonts
Dafont - DaFont is one of the most wide-known free to download fonts sites. Here you can browse thousand of fonts by alphabetical listing, by style, by author or by popularity. DaFont is probably one of the oldest and most popular free fonts website in the world. DaFont is straightforward to use and it contains north of 60.000 fonts with zero restriction on the use of public domain fonts.
Google Font - Google Fonts is a web font service owned by Google. This includes free and open source font families, an interactive web directory for browsing the library, and APIs for using the fonts via CSS and Android. It can be helpful in making your design work more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography. Google's robust catalog of open-source fonts and icons, makes it easy to integrate expressive type and icons seamlessly.
Adobe Font - Adobe Fonts is an online service that provides its subscribers with access to its font library, under a single licensing agreement. Adobe Fonts partners with the world's leading type foundries to bring thousands of beautiful fonts to designers every day and there is no need to worry about licensing. Adobe Fonts is included for free with all plans. You can Sign-up on AdobeFont website to get complete access to the Adobe Fonts library.
FontBundles - Font Bundles Store is a collection of PUA encoded fonts and wonderful designs. There are both Paid & Free fonts available on FontBundles. You can download fonts for free by free sign-up or by login with Facebook or Google. Here you can Browse and download script, serif and sans serif fonts.
Zetafonts - Established in 2001, Zetafonts is an independent type foundry. It is Powered by a team of branding. Zetafonts has been producing a prolific portfolio of high-quality type families, including language and symbols extensions: a vast range of innovative and stylish fonts suitable for digital and physical applications.
Urbanfonts - UrbanFonts is the best place to download fonts and features an amazing collection of free fonts, premium fonts and free dingbats. With a wide collection of over 8,000 freeware fonts, you can download as many premium fonts as you want. Most fonts on this site are freeware, some are shareware or linkware. Some fonts provided are trial versions of full versions and may not allow embedding unless a commercial license is purchased or may contain a limited character set.
Icons
What Is An Icon?
Icons are simple graphic representations designed to express the essential visual characteristics and values of ideas or specific objects. Icon design is the process of designing a graphic symbol that represents some real, fantasy or abstract motive, entity or action. Think of them as simplified drawings of actual things that can be easily recognized.
A graphic icon directly represents an idea, concept, operation or action. Icons are similar to a logo design with more freedom of added abstract elements. Icons are available on the web mostly in ICO, PNG and SVG formats due to their heavy demands, which they can later be added into a project. You may have seen icon on mobile and desktop applications like Settings tool, Browser, Gallery and Music player, as well as on tools of certain apps.
6 Websites To Download Free Icons
IconFinder - founded in 2007, Iconfinder is a web company whose main product is a search engine for icons. Iconfinder gained popularity after a relaunch in 2009 and is now the largest icon search engine with more than 2 million unique users per month. Iconfinder is the world's largest marketplace for creative resources such as Icons, Illustrations, 3D illustrations in SVG, AI and PNG format.
Flaticon - Flaticon offers a wide catalogue of free icons made by professional designers in PNG and many other formats. Here you can explore and download free Icons and Stickers for your projects. Flaticon also offer icons in other formats such as PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD and CSS formats, but in order to download those formats, a premium subscription must be purchased. A credit to the author by including the attribution line is required if you download free icons as a free user.
SoftIcons - SoftIcons allow users to download icons and icon sets free of charge for personal use. The wide catalog contains 475,655 icons/images in 2,849 sets. Here you can find Icons related to many categories such as Animal Icons, Application Icons, Art Icons, Business Icons, Computer Icons, Folder Icons, Food & Drinks Icons, Game Icons, Holidays Icons, iPhone Icons, Medical Icons, Web Icons and many others.
IconArchieve - IconArchive is a tag-based icon search engine with more than 580,000 free to use icons for creative designers and web developers. Browse through a collection of 700K+ icons & 2,500+ iconsets by category, artist, popularity, date. The site also acts as a source of inspiration for new design ideas and a place to enjoy beautiful icons.
Icons8 - Icons 8 is a library of over 180,000+ icons, photos, vectors, and interface illustrations, as well as tons of free design features and cool editing tools to let designers express their ideas. Icons8 allows designers to express their ideas and all the assets are made by creative designers who delivers quality assets.
Iconstore - IconStore is a library of free vector icons created by talented designers to download for commercial use. Iconstore provides Inspirational designs, illustrations, and graphic elements from the world's best designers. All the icons published on the IconStore are made to be used freely. No attribution is required on Iconstore. You can use and modify the icons in personal and commercial projects.
You can also get free icons from DeviantArt, FreePik, Unblast.
Stay tuned for upcoming articles related to free, paid and trending design resources. These future articles will be related to downloading best or top 10 fonts, transitions, presets, plugins, templates and many other form of creative work.
