10 Online Graphic Design Resources Worth Discovering Today
Eye-catching fonts and bold images can help you generate compelling designs in record time. Busy creative professionals usually have a vector stash and an extensive typeface collection at the ready, into which they dip when it’s time to create visual magic. You can build up a similar collection of go-to graphic design resources via the following ten sites, which offer a diverse selection of valuable assets.
Visit Font Squirrel to discover brand new fonts of practically every genre. You can dive right in on the first page, which showcases some of the site’s favorite fonts, or use the search bar to find exactly what you want. Use the site to create a collection of beautifully designed novelty, retro and handwritten typefaces, as well as high-quality serif and sans-serif fonts. Consistently well drawn, typefaces at Font Squirrel are ideal for a variety of projects and are free for commercial use.
Go to Pixeden to download a bevy of vectors, print graphics and web graphics. Use the site to find awesome free WordPress themes and create your professional web presence without spending a lot of money. Select your favorites from a host of icons and add textures to your image roster to craft more interesting backgrounds. Check out Pixeden’s modifiable PSD files to create three-dimensional objects quickly and easily in Photoshop. Much of what sits on the site is free to use, but you can gain access to premium content for a minimal monthly amount.
Save time when you choose icons on Iconfinder rather than making your own. An essential resource for web designers, this site had 1,700,000 icons in 2017, with an ever-growing, high-quality inventory. Easy to navigate, Iconfinder provides many of its icons for free and most others are surprisingly inexpensive. To explore premium designs, consider investing in an Iconfinder Pro membership, which offers busy professionals an economical way to improve their workflows. You can also become a contributor on Iconfinder, generating icons and putting them up for sale on the site.
If you frequently work with brand names, add Brands of the World to your favorites list. This site hosts an array of name-brand vector logos, which you can scale to any size in Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign without any loss of quality. Use the logos to create billboards, posters, flyers and other print graphics. Vector logos also work well in web design, because vectors load surprisingly quickly on the internet. If you’ve previously traced poor-quality commercial logos, you can upload them to Brands of the World to help other designers, too.
Full of intelligent articles and fascinating insight, Brain Pickings provides inspiration to artistic professionals all over the world. Founded in 2006 by Bulgarian writer and blogger Maria Popova, Brain Pickings offers its guests “a human-discovery engine for interestingness.” If you’re feeling unmotivated and need a lift, pop over to the site to read absorbing interviews with intellectual creatives for a mental pick-me-up. Brain Pickings is ad free, so it’s clean and pleasant to navigate, and while it is entirely free, you can become a supporting member to help sustain the site.
Constantly updated, always fresh and a great source for inspiration, DeviantArt has become a regular haunt for designers, some of whom also contribute work and create online portfolios to attract new clients. Many artists on the site offer their digital wares for free, while others charge nominal fees for graphics, textures, fonts, Photoshop templates and other useful products. There is a search function on DeviantArt, but you can also scroll through new offerings at random to rediscover your enthusiasm, downloading the designs you like best.
Check out Creative Market to explore a range of artistic assets provided by well over 20,000 other creative professionals. You’ll find templates for business cards, invitations and websites, as well as fonts, 3D shapes and more. Peruse and pick out various types of graphics, including patterns, stock photos, textures and shapes, and make them part of your design kit. You’ll also find add-ons like Photoshop brushes, plug-ins and layer styles. Every week, Creative Market makes a certain number of products available for free, and you can purchase additional assets for less than you might think.
Community-based and easy to browse, FreeVectors provides visitors with a smorgasbord of vector files, all of which are fine for personal use and most of which are also available for commercial use. Discover objects, icons, illustrations and textures, and download them to a dedicated folder in seconds. If you need scalable graphics for your print projects and don’t have a lot of time to waste, this site might just be a lifesaver. You can also submit your own vectors to the site, expanding your web presence in the process.
Beautifully simple and utterly dedicated to the open-source fonts it showcases, Open Foundry is an essential for many creative professionals. Scroll through the Hot 30 section to find accessible and interesting typefaces, which work for an array of print and web projects. Use the handy slider above each font to adjust its size to determine exactly how it’ll look online; adjust the background color and the font color to create a quick mock-up on screen. You can also submit your own open-source fonts for consideration via the ultra-simple form on the site.
Based in the UK, Digital Arts delves into all things creative, including 3D art, animation, effects, graphics, video production and more. Brush up on your Adobe prowess and learn new skills when you visit the site’s tutorials section, which provides easy-to-follow lessons on a variety of topics. Explore industry news and learn about the latest versions of Illustrator, After Effects, Photoshop and other software types. Packed with interesting features, Digital Arts makes a great companion at break time or lunchtime.
When you collect and carefully organize fonts, background images and other assets, you lay the foundations for a streamlined creative process. Meanwhile, expanding your horizons via learning can help you generate new ideas more easily. Get into the flow quickly and enjoy yourself on the job with high-quality graphic design resources, which help you produce consistently good results.
I had most of these on my radar already but I am glad to see that there are some more hidden gems out there that are worth the time. This is when you know someone loves their creative passion, to create resources for the rest of us! Well done.