Ultimate Free Design Resources. Just imagine having all the tools to make your life as a graphic designer not only easy but enjoyable and smooth. Now imagine having all of this at your fingertips, totally for free. Imagine having the tools to unleash your full creativity and your confidence whilst elevating your designs. Now imagine having all of that at your fingertips totally for free. Well, today you’ve come to the right place.
Number 01: Google Courses / Free Courses
Starting with Google courses. Yes, that’s right Google does have over 160 courses on things like digital marketing and career development and even things like coding. Now you can select your difficulty preference on the left, and that’s out of beginner intermediate, and advanced. Also, the course length and the certificate preference.
But do you want some more free courses? Well, why wouldn’t you, as of today there are 2650 free courses.
You can see the reviews and the star rating that you won’t be wasting your time on. One course that you might want to check out is this one on the coding language python.
Number 02: Open Source Fonts
https://usemodify.com/
Use modify has a relatively large selection of fonts. They’re all open source, meaning you can use them on designs from anything from corporate branding projects to making a funny birthday card for a relative.
Also, you’re allowed to modify the fonts as well which is really cool. Now I like to head into the keyword section and browse topics up here such as Sans serif. You can find a nice amount of typefaces that offer a lot of different fonts.
For example, look how many weights can be found in this one just right here. Yes, there’s going to be some obvious garbage to look through, but there are a lot of free gems to grab and download from this website.
Number 03: Best Inspiration
https://httpster.net/
Moving on to something I use on a weekly basis and that is httpster. I’ve mentioned it before in a different post. But I want to mention it again for those who have missed it. Because you’ll soon realize why I do use it so much. This website showcases some of the most unique and Visually appealing and functional websites out there.
I don’t design websites so why should I even care about this? Well, because firstly it offers a ton of inspiration. Scrolling and browsing over the websites we can pick up on some really neat and cutting-edge graphic design. But also we can see what sort of techniques and styles are being used in the design industry right here today. So basically it allows us to keep up to date with the kind of Direction the design industry is heading in. But yeah it’s also pretty much just eye candy for us graphic designers.
Number 04: BluGraphic
https://www.blugraphic.com/
Next up a website that has a variety of different graphic design downloads, notably some awesome mock-ups. But there are fun some mock-ups, illustrations, templates and much much more all three of course.
The mock-ups are really good though, and you can see that with this vertical flag mock-up. After spending a little bit of time on here I realize that blue Graphics has some of the best package design mock-ups that I’ve seen recently. So this one is a Sure Fire bookmark if you ask me.
Number 05: Dribble Freebies
https://dribbble.com/tags/design_freebies
Now we’ve all likely heard of the dribble. But this link will take you to the freebies that you can find on dribble all of which are organized and laid out ready to be clicked. As it states you can find all sorts of things from the best designers around today.
And when you come to the bottom you’ll notice that it pretty much just comes to an end. However, if you click the search results button you’ll be taken to all of the freebies that are in offer. So do have a browse and see what you can grab totally for free.
Number 06: Screen Sizes
https://screensiz.es/
Next up is something I’ve shown before but this is a more advanced and re-ramped version of that thing. If you’re somebody who works with app or web design. This website has up-to-date screen sizes for literally everything out there. We’re talking about devices operating systems screen sizes and resolutions and much much more. There are so many devices cataloged on here that is pretty crazy. And to my knowledge, it’s something that is updated on a regular basis.
You can search for something or have a look through smartphones, tablets, or desktop monitors. It’s a very very handy resource for those who do work on Graphics, that need to find their way to screens. You can also click the top menu bar to arrange things from ascending to descending it’s pretty cool.
Number 07: Free Font Foundry
https://www.atipofoundry.com/
Atipo is a font Foundry that I stumbled across last week almost by accident. They have some unique typefaces to download. But again let’s quickly check their license agreements. For print materials, the desktop license is good for commercial use. And for website design and so forth the one below is fine. But the thing is with this website is that most typefaces have one or two fonts for free, that you can download from a family. Then if you really do like that family you can consider purchasing the entire family of fonts. Now I think it’s a really fair method and considering that these typefaces are pretty well made. I think it’s worth taking a look at this website in more detail.
There are also custom fonts that The Foundry have worked on for clients. That can be fun to look at into each of the case studies if you are a type of nerd like myself.
Number 08: Awwwards Fonts
https://www.awwwards.com/awwwards/collections/free-fonts/
More font goodness here with Awards it’s about with three W’s. Awards is a very well known entity within the graphic design world and they hand out prestigious Graphic Design Awards on an annual basis. But they also have a bunch of fonts for you to browse over right here. With this website, you click on the fonts that you want and then you often click again to be directed to the download source. Some of them are not free or even free for commercial use. So you need to make sure and read the license agreements before you download.
That applies with this one here three of the fonts are free from the family. And the other ones you will need to pay for. it’s another really awesome website where you can snipe some awesome fonts from some awesome typefaces. I think this one is in need of a bookmark of course.
Number 09: Vector Wiki
https://vectorwiki.com/
A quick one here with a handy little resource called a vector Wiki. When working on a project you might need to use famous logos or designs on your projects. And with this tool you can search them and download them in an instance. The library is quite extensive actually and more so than other similar sites that I’ve seen.
And of course, you can download your searches as high quality SVG files which are always nice. This website was mentioned by someone in my Discord server so thanks to that person who I can actually remember right now.
Number 10: Logo Inspiration
https://logopond.com/
Logo Pond is filled with logo designs that can boost your creativity. The categories are seen here and looking over the featured section it’s obvious that we have a wide range of styles of logo design.
It is always good and handy to have a scope of what is going on in a logo design industry and this website can help with just that. In the top right there are other categories to look over and I personally do enjoy looking at client work. That’s because you can see what designers have made for actual client projects.
Number 11: ShotSnapp & Mockups
https://shotsnapp.com/
This website allows you to have more of a Hands-On approach when generating mock-ups for your presentations. You can change the backgrounds of the devices and objects using colors, patterns, textures and so on. Short snap is a fast way to make unique and in custom mock-ups and it’s really easy to use as well. This might appeal to some of your designers out there who want a different kind of workflow when using mock-ups.
Oh, and it’s also completely free. Well, the free version does have some limitations but it will do just fine for most people. But the paid version isn’t that expensive anyway.
Number 12: Free Illustrations
Next up is a huge huge library of totally free illustrations. This website really does have a wide diverse selection for you to browse over or you can just search in the search bar. Taking a look at this set of neat 3D illustrations here, we can see that we don’t need to add any attribution.
As they are completely free for commercial use. Let’s face it that’s really what we want to see. You can also head over to the home page and browse in accordance to the file types so AI, EPs, Figma and so on. do always make sure to check the license agreements however and that’s found on the left.
Number 13: Burst Stock Images
https://burst.shopify.com/
But moving on I thought that I had found all of the decent stock image websites out there. But I was wrong here is the best which has some really high quality images for you to use on your projects totally for free. Utilizing the search bar we can narrow down what we need and you’ll notice that the images are really high quality and it’s not what you find on most stock image websites.
My favorite is still Unsplash however, but keeping up with the trend in today’s post let’s check the license on this website. So yeah free for commercial use and no attribution needed. Attribution is encouraged however of course to keep creators happy and enthusiastic it just makes sense in some situations.
Number 14: Social Sizes
https://socialsizes.io/
Now we graphic designers often work for clients that need social artwork. But maybe for our personal branding and social accounts. Can be confusing to know what size each document should be relative to each social media platform. Well, this website has up-to-date sizes for every single platform. Not only that it offers free downloads as you can see here for xdps and AI.
They’re quick and easy to download and I’m sure you can see how helpful this website can be. It’s probably a good idea to bookmark this little gem somewhere in your folders.
The website also has some tools up here which I haven’t explored too much myself. But that’s something that you might want to do in your own time. However, the main lure of this website is of course all of the social media document downloads.
Number 15: Templates
https://www.template.net/
Thinking about free downloads this next resource has tons of ready-made to use templates. Now if we give a quick search for a contract as an example. We can see all of these templates come up in the search results. You want to ideally look for this label here in gray that says free. Now they have tons and tons of categories as you can see at the top. Looking at the invoice templates section we have a nice number of free downloads.
Now, this website does have some excellent free finds if you do look around and it’s another one I suggest you add to your bookmark folder.
Number 16: Fontesk
https://fontesk.com/
Now, this website is totally awesome and let me show you why. every single download is displayed with creative artwork. We also have this handy dandy free-for-commercial use button. So that basically means now that every single download we look at is going to be illegally okay to use on any project. But going back to the creative art side of things. Every single typeface we see here has a nice little thumbnail showing us how the fonts in the family might look.
Furthermore, if we actually head into one of the downloads. We get even more creative goodness and we can see the font family in action of our choice. this not only looks good, but it might be a good indication of how best to use these fonts. There are a lot of fonts on this website as well and you can make use of the browse categories at the very top. Also, you can see here that it states that this font is free for commercial use. As promised with a handy search button.
Number 17: AlienValley
https://alienvalley.com/freebies/
Alien Valley also has a free and premium option by clicking the freebies option here. There are tons of free and clean mock-ups to download. Now my style of design when working on client projects mainly does match the style of mock-up. So I’ve personally downloaded loads of them and put them into my mockups folder for later use.
So yeah if you want some free clean and minimal mock-ups. Then this site might be another good option for you to look at and looking at. In this book mock-up here we can see how crisp and how clear everything looks. As I said it’s totally free too. They do have other things like fonts and templates on alien Valley. So it might be worth having a good lucky loo and a good peek around and seeing what’s what.
