Last updated: May 31, 2023
If you’re a graphic designer running your own business, then you’ll want to save every penny without any doubts and it’s not a shame. To help you we’ve pulled together an significant guide to the best free resources for graphic designers for your next design projects, so be ready, take a coffee and do what you can best.
Free designs can be also interesting, unique and professional because they are crafted by professional designers with a mark of good quality. We’ll update this essential list of free resources when we can do this. For now, here are our fresh suggestions to help you enjoy a budget-conscious but super creative. Keep a good mood and enjoy.
You may also like:
- 40+ Places to Find Free Stock Photos
- 7 Recommended Platforms To Sell Your Fonts
- 23 Free Creative Mockup Websites For Designers
- 10 Exciting Places To Sell Your Design Online
Table of Contents show
Free Stock Images
Probably every designer will agree that a design will not be complete without beautiful illustrated photographs.
Pexels
One of our favorite links is Pexels, which has millions of quality photos in its free collection. Download them and create the articles without any problems.
Unsplash
Another stock photo website powered by a friendly community of photographers. There are some really appropriate choices via Unsplash. This could be your favourite destination of good quality free photographs.
Moose
Promising stock photos by a “movie-scale crew”, Moose brings you categories of people, ethnicity, style, fashion and more.. plenty to choose from.
StockSnap
The original and only such beautiful photos that you can download for free and enliven your articles.
Nappy
Nappy was founded to address the traditional stock photo sites that were once lacking in diversity. Create your own designs by using the mixed photos of black and brown people, for free.
FreeImages
All nice and all free photos to download and create your project professional without spending a lot of money. Use for either personal or commercial needs.
Burst
Genuine free stock photos for pernal and commercial needs. A super resource courtesy of Shopify. there are also textures and backgrounds available, so plenty to play with.
New Old Stock
These photos does so exactly what it says on the tin: vintage photographs from the public archives, free of known copyright restrictions and with the aim of recapturing history.
Free Nature Stock
If you design requires some amazing nature photos you can get them freely at this website. Created by Adrian Pelletier, a graphic designer and self-taught front-end developer.
ISO Republic
Thousands of free to use photos and videos in their creative collection. ISO is a one-stop-shop for all your visual needs. Have a nice time by browsing the various sections, from people and food to travel and animals.
Nappy, free stock photos
Free Stock Videos
Sometimes we need something exceptional to liven up our design or website, so our wishes are taken into account as you will find something interesting in this video footage section.
Vimeo
It has free HD stock footage for you to download and use for whatever purpose you require. In this resource includes 258 videos generously donated by nearly 30,000 community members.
Pond5
It’s difficult to believe that footage via Pond5 is free and ready to use on your website or for your next design. Plenty of clips to keep you occupied. And there’s even a section on free photographs and audio, too.
Coverr
It is one of the original sites in this category, to kindly give back to the creative community with its excellent selection of clips. Find videos for any kind as they promose.
Adobe Stock
The people behind Adobe are giving away a decent selection of free videos based on themes such as business, nature and people. In the mean time you will find original free stock photos and motion graphic templates.
Cute Stock Footage
VFX, light leaks, overlays, backgrounds and more other over 4,000 free clips to discover.
Pond5, free stock footage
Free Stock Music and Audio
How do you get such an opportunity to embed sound in your design? Whether it’s videos, as well as sound effects and essential sounds. We’ve got you covered.
Uppbeat
Royalty free music for creators without copyright claims with tracks from your favourite beatmakers. See what’s trending and enjoy listening to the website community’s top picks.
Free Music Archive
Totally free music for YouTube, Facebook, podcasts and other media projects. It’s your number one resource for free downloads. FMA promises “not just free music, but good music”.
MixKit
Awesome stock video clips, music, sound effects are available to download for free. The growing library will not leave indifferent. New content added every week from creators worldwide.
Bensound
In Bensound you can download royalty free stock music for YouTube and other multimedia projects. It’s are free to use as long as you credit the website and don’t use it for anything like audiobooks, podcasts or for making songs. Always read the small print.
Videvo
Whilst many of the sound effects at Videvo cost money, many are free. From relaxing ocean waves splashing, police sirens to rain falling and wind whistling, you’ll have everything you need to make your design project to lively.
Uppbeat, free stock music and audio
Free Illustrations
At this point, we want to introduce our best illustration friends and give them some attention. Illustrations are probably much needed by designers, so such a dose of free designs is only to your advantage.
Humaaans
Mix-&-match illustrations of people with a design library. An comprehensive resource by Pablo Stanley that can be used with Blushto create your own compositions.
unDraw
Browse to find the illustrations that fit your needs and download for free. You can use the on-the-fly color image generation to match your brand identity.
Pimp my Drawing
A free collection of CAD drawings of people, brought to you by three recently graduated architecture students. No registration is needed to access the content, so easy as that.
Free Illustrations
As designer you can find tons of amazing illustrations for your design project. From artworks on themes such as sneakers and transport to retro vectors and helpful icons, it’s a curated web resource to add to your bookmarks.
Open Peeps
Download the illustration library and create your own Peeps! All of them are genuinely drawn by hand. Awesome resource by Pablo Stanley, allowing you to mix and match different characters with various elements to create your own unique illustrations.
DrawKit
Updated weekly hand-drawn vector illustrations and icon resources, perfectly fit for your design project. You can also enjoy browsing the premium illustration packs, they start at $10, so it’s hardly breaking the bank.
Lukasz Adam
Improve every design for free. Attract more visitors and increase your conversion rate with custom made illustrations. SVG illustrations free for commercial and personal use under the CC0 license. No attribution is required.
Pixabay
Free and inspired illustrations for your perconal or commercial creation of artworks. You can enjoy also free stock photos, vectors, videos, music and sound effects. This website has grown enormously since its launch. Sign up and become a member to join the fun.
Open Doodles
A free set of open-source illustrations. You can copy, edit, remix, share, or redraw for any purpose without restriction under copyright or database law. It’s another classic resource courtesy of Pablo Stanley.
Absurd
What about absurd illustrations for your design projects? Take every user on an individual journey through their own imagination. It is brought to you by Diana Valeanu, whose side project has grabbed the attention of the design community worldwide.
Absurd.Design, free illustrations for designers
Free Icons
Icons may be the smallest of friends in design, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter. They sometimes play very important roles such as logos and category descriptions.
Simple Icons
At this moment here are 2,141 SVG icons of popular brands to download for free. Started by Dan Leech a professional designer. These icons making your life much easier eventually.
Ionicons
Premium designed icons for use in web, iOS, Android, and desktop apps. Supported for SVG and web font. Built by the Ionic Framework team, they’re all free and open source.
Free Icons
It is a platform for designers and developers for a wide variety of high-quality icons of different styles and sizes. Claiming to be the largest database of free icons on the web. These goodies available in PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD and BASE 64 formats. Enjoy.
Icon-Icons
Best free icons for personal and commercial use available in SVG and PNG file formats. You can download flat, line and icon sets. This site will have you covered with any your needs.
Iconscout
Crowdsourced royalty-free decent seriously icons for personal and commercial use. Be wise and use them for any kind of design project.
Flaticons
Over 2,400 royalty-free flat icons on various categories for your personal and commercial web projects. There’s even a flat icon maker where you can create your own icons with ease.
Animaticons
Beautiful, customizable and high-resolution animated GIF icons. They are small in file size, compatible with all major browsers, emails, and smartphones and don’t require any special plugins or libraries.
The Noun Project
Co-founded by Sofya Polyakov, Edward Boatman and Scott Thomas, The Noun Project offers over two million curated icons created by a global community. All these goodies are available for free usage.
Font Awesome
this superb little site has a great range of assets for your next design project. There are also some ‘Pro Only’ options available to paying members.
IconMonstr
There’s nothing monstrous about this abundant resource. Discover 4512+ free icons in 316 collections, that can either be heavyweight or lightweight, depending on your design. The founder Alexander Kahlkopf, a senior designer from Germany with over 15 years of professional experience in icon design.
The Noun Project, free icons
Free Fonts
Fonts are amazing creations in every graphic and web design and can be very expensive for a novice designer. Take a look at our list and find the right free font for you eventually.
Google Fonts
A potent directory of open source web fonts for designers to use for all necessary needs. All created to the high standards you’d expect from the world’s largest search engine.
Fonts Space
This is your home for designer-centered, legitimate, and clearly licensed free fonts. The website with fonts broken down into different styles was founded in 2006.Just double-check the small print before you use anything for commercial purposes.
Font Squirrel
Font Squirrel is another extensive archive of free fonts, all free for commercial use. You can download the needed font or copy a PNG file format from ‘test drive’ to add it in your design easily.
Fontfabric
It is a modern website full of useful fonts in different styles to download for your design. Designers love Nexa and Mont Blanc, but there are lots more to browse on this nicely designed website.
Use & Modify
This is a personal selection of beautiful, classy, punk, professional, incomplete, weird typefaces. This website provides open-source fonts that are free to use and available to modify them.
1001 Free Fonts
The website is not the most perfect in the world, but who cares when 1001 Free Fonts gives you loads of free fonts to download and use. Some of them are only free for personal use, but if you need to go commercial, you can download 10,000 fonts for just $20 or thereabouts.
MyFonts
Like other large fonts shops, MyFonts has a range of free fonts that you can download and use at no cost. Just choice what is ideal for your design and volia.
Font Zone
This essential website offers thousands of free fonts to enhance your own websites, documents, greeting cards, and more. You can browse popular fonts by themes, name or style.
UrbanFonts
This space features a decent collection of free fonts, premium fonts and free dingbats. With over 8,000 freeware fonts, there are many options to browse and use. Make sure you review any files included with your download, which will usually include information on the usage and licenses of each font.
DaFont
It is an enormous archive of freely downloadable fonts. Browse by alphabetical listing, by style, by author or by popularity and you can enjoy the greatest fonts at no cost.
Fontfabric, free typography for designers
Free Graphic Design Tools
We can fully recommend these tools because not every designer has full pockets of coins. These free graphic design tools have been very carefully selected to suit every taste and need.
Figma
All the elements you need to create amazing logos, social media graphics, presentations and more, of cource for free.
PaperSizes
A comprehensive resource listing all international standards for paper sizes, dimensions and formats – all right there, online and free to use.
Vectr
An outstanding free vector graphics editor that’s simple and powerful, allowing you to design and edit vector graphics like a pro via its website and desktop cross-platform without any steep learning curve.
Inkscape
Whether you are an illustrator, designer, web designer or just someone who needs to create some vector imagery, Inkscape is for you! This website is a powerful design tool that allows you to edit vector graphics and for free.
Gravit Designer
Another one professional vector design app that you can access from anywhere on any machine. Fast and flexible graphic design tools that work the way you do. A free version to get started with 500MB of cloud storage, PDF export, and colour space. To access more features, simply upgrade the plan.
VistaCreate
It’s a free graphic design tool to help you create impressive content in minutes. Browse thousands of professional templates and edit them right away.
Font Joy
Finally, font pairing made simple thanks to this most excellent free resource. Match the fonts that will work beautifully together with an easy online tool that even allows you to add your own text to work on.
Vectee*zy
The editor designed to allow anyone to customize Vectee*zy content before you want to download it, or create beautiful vector designs from scratch directly in your browser. Perfect!
Wordmark
Difficult to decide on which typography to use in your designs? Wordmark helps you choose those fonts. Simply type in a word or sentence to its preview search bar, and it’ll show you a range of options on your screen.
Canva
Canva is an online design and publishing tool with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere. Not all are free to use, but a huge amount of 250,000 free templates might just be enough to get you started.
Vectr, free vector graphics editor
Free Color Tools
Colors are very important in graphic design as they help to maintain a good atmosphere and mood of the visitors. These recommended free tools will inspire some seriously gorgeous color schemes and help you make something your clients will love.
Coolors
Get inspired by thousands of beautiful color schemes and make your design attractive. No payment is required. It’s just an amazing community of designers who share and generate their own inspiring palettes.
Color Hunt
It’s an open collection of beautiful color palettes created by Gal Shir. The collection scaled up and is now being used daily as a handy resource for thousands of people worldwide.
Site Palette
A browser extension to generate comprehensive palettes. A must-have tool for designers and frontend developers. A free color scheme extraction available inside.
Web Gradients
It’s a free collection of 180 linear gradients that you can use as content backdrops in any part of your website. Created by Dima Braven.
Color Lisa
This website offers palette masterpieces from the world’s greatest artists. For example, if you love The Starry Night by Van Gogh, then this wonderful tool gives you all of the colors the artist used in that particular piece. Enjoyable for sure!
Color Hunt, beautiful color palettes
Free Image Editing Tools
When Adobe Photoshop showing his character, then there are plenty of alternative tools available to working on with the images editing for free and in your own web browser. So, take a look at some of our recommendations.
Fotor
Free to edit photos with this photo editor in just a few clicks. It covers all online photo editing tools, so you can crop images, resize images, add text to photos, even make photo collages, and create graphic designs easily.
iLoveIMG
Your online photo editor is here and forever free! Here you can compress, resize, crop, convert, edit, add watermark and other important things for all your needs. A great tool which you will really love.
Remove BG
Whether you want to make a mind-blowing greetings card for your bestie or to power through thousands of car photos in next to no time, remove.bg makes it happen. In five seconds with zero clicks, you’ve saved yourself hours of editing.
Social Sizes
Sick of looking up the exact image dimensions for all the different social media platforms? This website has an amazing collection of free image and video sized templates for Sketch, Figma, XD, Photoshop and Illustrator. Free to use.
Pixlr
This excellent photo editor and template designer lets you start editing your images at the click of a button. It’s free with a premium option should you wish to upgrade and access more features.
Kapwing
Itis an easy way to edit your images in the perfect way that you want. While there are a lot of different methods for editing images, Kapwing is fast, free, and works in directly in your browser.
Remove BG, a tool to remove backgrounds for free
Free Mockup Tools
You finally finished your hard work so you decided to show it off. Mocking up your projects will really showcase what you’re capable of, making your online portfolio rejoice and helping to convince new clients to hire you. Below are our recommendations for best mockup tool websites eventually.
UI Faces
This website aggregates various free avatar placeholder sources that you can use in your design
mockups. Acting as the perfect placeholders, this is a great resource for example to finalize your about pages.
Shotsnapp
Create a beautiful device mockup images for your app or website design. Simply choose a device, add an image of your design or screenshot, make some changes to the appearance, then download and off you go.
Screely
It allows you to instantly turn a screenshot into a browser mockup. Drag and drop your files, paste from your clipboard or browse files and the mockup is made. Choose between different browser windows, edit your images, and customize your background.
Artboard Studio
Design, animate and present your projects with an extensive library of mockups right inside the browser with your team. As with most of these tools, there are free options, and there are professional upgrades. Take your pick.
Screenpeek
It captures any website within a high quality mockup in seconds. Choose the iPhone template and type in the URL to get what you need for free. Upgrade to ‘Pro’ if you want access to more templates, such as the iPad, MacBook, and iMac.
House of Mockups
House of Mockups was established as a fierce creative community founded by Anthony Wood. Here, you’ll find a selection of free and premium mockups that will “dazzle clients with photographic realism”.
Smart Mockups
This app looks really promising. It gives you the ability to create nice marketing images without using Photoshop. Yes, there are lots of free options to choose from. And you’ll certainly enjoy seeing the tool do all the hard work for you. But if you need to access more, the site allows to upgrade.
The Templates
This stunning website brings you high-quality mockups from the talented folk behind the brand Identity. A cool resource for any discerning graphic designer.
Graphic Burger
With loads of variety, Graphic Burger might be one of the more established mockup resource sites on the web, but its content remains prime and interesting.
Artboard Studio, free mockup templates to showcase your designs
Free Screenshot and Screen Recorder Tools
What about those all important screenshots and assets? Sure, you can manually capture what you need, but some tools just do the job better. If you are ready to know more just take a look at our favorites.
Gliphy Capture
It’s the best way to create GIFs on your Mac. Simple, powerful, free, and easy enough for pretty much everyone and even a few small mammals.
Collabshot
Free web and desktop application that enables quick screen grabs, easy URL-based sharing, and live, multi-person drawing and sketching. Just download the app and get started.
Snappy
It lets you take snapshots of screens as well as clip stuff ready for future reference.
GoFullPage
A one click to capture a full webpage. Add it to Chrome and start capturing what you need.
EasyScreen
It is a powerful GIF screen capture software for creating screenshots and screencasts. Capture your computer screen, add your voice and webcam for narration. Ideal for games, demos, video tutorials and more. Record Screencasts fast and free!
Screen Recorder
It’s a free screen recorder with no watermark that lets you capture your desktop in one click and share instantly.
Markup Hero
It’s a free screenshot and annotation tool made for the web. Works on Mac, Windows, Linux and Chrome and lets you start annotating in seconds.
ScreenToGif
A free screen, webcam and sketchboard recorder tool with an integrated editor. There is plenty to play with here, especially when you need to create some seriously nice gifs that will showcase your work.
Screen Capture
Free online screen recorder. Schedule recordings, draw on videos, show keystrokes and mouse clicks. Save files in any popular format. You can do all this and much more with the desktop version. The possibility to use more services with the upgrade.
Collabshot, free screengrab tool
Free Design Inspiration
Every day we are faced with a myriad of designs that are stagnant, there is no new wind blowing, so it’s worth taking a look at the selected content to see what the design world is worth noting. We always need inspiration, so let’s take a look at our favorites below.
Decolore
This website can be your friend if you need to know what’s going in design space. Here you will get an graphic and web design inspiration, design articles and comprehensive design collections in one place.
Creative Boom
One of the most attractive place for designers to visit every day to get an inspiration from many kind of creative articles. Here, the Creative Boom share the latest brand identities, the latest industry news, and relevant books and magazines.
Mirador
It’s the image hunting work of Say What Studio, a graphic design duo website based in Paris. Enjoy looking through the curated guide of the most inspirational works out there.
Wix Creative
The cloud-based development platform, has its own blog where it shares tips and advice on designing your online portfolio while sharing some of the most inspiring web designs in the planet.
Inspiration Grid
It is an online magazine celebrating creative talent from around the world. Your daily fix of design, art, illustration, typography, photography, architecture, fashion and more.
Behance
One of the most biggest portal for creative design and first stop for beginner or professional designers to get an inspiration. Behance, also acts as a showcase of the latest design projects from creative pros worldwide. Search and filter by creative field, color, location, or tools to really get under the bonnet of what’s happening right here.
Dribbble
Dribbble is a great source of inspiration when you need an uplift. Its members share creative work via the platform, you can enjoy browsing some of their latest projects or hire the designer from big community whenever you like.
Httpster
It is an inspiration resource showcasing totally rocking websites made by people from all over the world. Get inside and let’s your juices flowing.
It’s Nice That
Typography, logos, rebrands, and portfolios, plus thousands of interviews with both new and established designers. Whatever your graphic design needs, you’ll find what you’re looking for right here.
Creative Review
From new work to in-depth coverage, reviews and opinion, here you’ll find all you need on creativity in graphic design. Creative Review will keep you abreast of what’s happening across the UK.
The Design Blog
Founded, designed, and curated byRuby Bacanovic – Croatian designer based in Los Angeles, CA. The Design Blog brings you carefully curated design inspiration, featuring works of designers and design studios from all over the world, with the main focus to curate emerging talents.
Identity Designed
It is a website and book devoted to the design of visual identities. Identity Designed become one of the best sources of inspiration out there. It was founded by David Airey, an independent graphic designer based in Northern Ireland.
Featured image by freepik.com