You don’t need to be a pro-designer with an agency-sized resource budget to create amazing images, banners and designs. You just need to know where to find the best free online resources.
Take a look at our not-a-designer’s guide to the best free online design resources to make your projects look amazing.
Free Stock Images
Because you can’t upload pictures of your cat for every project.
StockSnap
StockSnap is the go-to platform for most people for free stock images. It references multiple free platforms and brings you beautiful, high-quality images which usually only require that you make mention of the photographer somewhere.
Burst by Shopify
Shopify has put together a library of downloadable FREE stock images. You don’t have to be a Shopify user to access them either.
New Old Stock
Boston product designer, Cole Townsend, has put together a wonderful library of copyright-free vintage stock photos (New Old Stock) which you can use as you please.
Free Illustrations
We’re not all artistic, luckily many of those artists love to share.
Drawkit
Drawkit is a collection of free customizable MIT licensed SVG illustrations which are available for you to use on your website, app, or project.
Ouch Pics
Ouch.pics is a collection of clean, colourful free vector illustrations.
Free Icons
Need an Icon for that? There are other places to look – but only one where you will always find what you need.
Flaticon
Flaticon is a fantastic place to find free icons for just about anything you can imagine.
Graphic Design Tools
Make those images do what you need them to do.
Gimp
Gimp is a completely free image editor that will help you manipulate your images to your hearts desire.
Canva
Canva is a fantastic tool that will let you upload your images (or use theirs) and turn them into all kinds of fabulous projects – from social media posts to your flyers or your online CV.
Remove
Need to remove the background on an image? Remove is a tool is nothing short of magic. Upload your photo and it will automatically detect the focal point and remove everything else. Is it foolproof? No. But it’s pretty good, and a lot faster than deep-edging!
