30 Excellent Resources for Graphic Design Freebies

Jan 11 2009 by Jacob Gube | 48 Comments | Stumble Bookmark

You can find a variety of useful and creative graphic design resources on the web the offer downloadables such as stock photos, textures/patterns, brushes, icons, and fonts that designers have decided to share with others in the community.

In this article, you’ll find some of the best websites to visit for graphic design resources.

Stock Photos

Flickr: Creative Commons

Flickr, the premier site for online photo-sharing and the hangout of many designers and photographers, has a section called Flickr: Creative Commons that allows you to quickly view user-submitted images that have a Creative Commons license.

morguefile

morguefile contains user-submitted stock photographs contributed by many artists. morguefile has a terrific organization scheme and thumbnail preview for quicker searches. Also check out morguefile’s very active forums to find tutorials and to converse with artists that are members of the site.

stock.xchng

stock.xhchng (also known as SXC) is a very popular photo-sharing and stock photography site with over 380,000 stock photos. And if that wasn’t enough for you, they also have a tutorials section that covers photography/graphic design topics.

Stockvault.net

Stockvault.net is another excellent photo-sharing site for designers and photographers. The community boasts almost 14,000 members and over 3,000 photographers ensuring that you’ll have more than plenty of high-quality stock photos to sift through.

everystockphoto

everystockphoto is a search engine for free photos. It currently indexes close to 5 million photos. You can sign up for a free user account so that you can take advantage of nifty site features such as the ability to save collections of photos for future reference.

Textures and Patterns

CG Textures

CG Textures is an excellent texture site created by 3D artist Marcel Vijfwinkel. CG Textures is structured to help you quickly find types of textures such as Grunge and Nature textures, but if you’re looking for something/someone specific, use the Advanced Search for more specific searches.

Squidfingers / Patterns

Squidfingers / Patterns is a collection of useful and intricate patterns that you can use as repeating CSS backgrounds or on print work. Squidfingers / Patterns is the work of graphic designer and programmer extraordinaire, Travis Beckham.

TextureKing

TextureKing is a fast-growing, high-resolution texture repository maintained by creative agency, REH3design. There are currently over 300 stock textures – usually available at 1,600 x 1,200 pixels. TextureKing is currently working on giving users the ability to submit their own textures to share.

Image * After

Image * After is a large collection of free photos and textures. The site provides images and textures that are available for personal, as well as commercial, purposes.

Lost and Taken

Lost and Taken is a blog-style repository of copyright-free stock textures created and maintained by photographer and writer, Caleb Kimbrough. Lost and Taken takes requests and suggestions, so if you can’t find something – try to send in a suggestion.

Brushes and Vectors

BrushKing

BrushKing offers a wide array of Adobe Photoshop brushes, all free for download. The site currently archives over 4,000 brushes and over 200 brush sets.

PS Brushes.net

PS Brushes.net shares beautiful and high-quality brush sets organized in a variety of categories such as the Patterns category and the Drawings category. If you’d like to see the full collection of brushes, check out the All Brushes category.

Vecteezy and Brusheezy

Vecteezy is a site that indexes free vector graphics by some of the top graphic designers in the world. Vecteezy also allows users to submit vectors to be indexed. Vecteezy has a sister site called Brusheezy which indexes free Adobe Photoshop brushes.

QVectors and QBrushes

QVectors shares and showcases free, high-quality vector images and artwork from around the web. QVectors has a sister site called QBrushes which highlights top-notch Adobe Photoshop brushes.

FreeVectors.net

FreeVectors.net is an online gallery that features free vector graphics by talented graphic artists. The vectors showcased on FreeVectors.net are available for personal and commercial use.

Icons

Iconfinder

Iconfinder is a search engine specifically for icons, developed and maintained by Glassbox. Iconfinder also has a tag cloud page so that you can visually see the most popular keyword tags.

Free Icons Web

Free Icons Web is an index of over 15,000 high-quality and free icons for graphic and web designs, as well as icons for the desktop. If you’re looking exclusively for icons in GIF format, check out the GIF Icons section.

Icon Archive

Icon Archive currently hosts 22,000 high-quality desktop and web icons. They have over 800 icon sets from close to 200 icon designers. Some categories on the site include Business Icons, Computer Icons, and Vintage Icons.

IconBuffet Free Delivery

IconBuffet, an icon foundry that sells icon artwork for web designs, has a variety of free icons in the IconBuffet Free Delivery section. Their icon sampling includes sets such as Retro Snow and Tonkawa Tiles.

Fonts

dafont.com

dafont.com is a repository of public domain, freeware, shareware, and demo fonts from some of the top font designers and foundries. With excellent organization and searchability features, it’s a great resource to visit for free fonts. Check out the Top 100 to see the most popular fonts on the site.

UrbanFonts.com

UrbanFonts.com is another excellent resource for top-notch, high-quality free fonts. The site currently indexes over 8,000 freeware fonts. You can find the most popular fonts by going to the Top 100 Free Font Downloads page.

Better Fonts

Better Fonts has a large collection of free fonts organized alphabetically and in several categories that include Retro fonts, Graffiti fonts, and Handwritten fonts. The site’s unique feature is that they provide live previews of all the fonts so that you can test the fonts before downloading and installing them.

General Resources – User-submitted, Search, and Blogs

deviantART

deviantART is the premier community for graphic artists. The downloadable graphic design resources are from community members and you will find absolutely everything in deviantArt, including vectors, brushes, textures, and much more.

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository that takes user-submitted publicly-available and freely-licensed media content. Wikimedia currently hosts over 3.7 million individual files organized several ways such as by topic (i.e. Art and People) and by type (i.e. Photos, Symbols, and Drawings).

Creative Commons Search

The Creative Commons Search by the Creative Commons organization is a search engine for CC-licensed media files. It allows you to search various sites (such as Flickr and Google) all in one convenient spot.

Freebies from BittBox

Designer Jay Hilgert offers a host of freebies on his design blog, BittBox. He has a regular post series called "Free Texture Tuesday" (here’s one of them) where he shares useful textures every Tuesday.

Freebies from Blog.SpoonGraphics

Graphic and web designer Chris Spooner offers a host of freebies along with useful and informative blog posts on the topic of design. You’ll find a variety of freebies such as the wildly popular Hand Drawn Doodle Icon Set and Wavy Vector Ribbon graphics.

Freebies from PSDTUTS

PSDTUTS, a site that gives Photoshop tutorials and information, has a growing freebie section submitted by a wide variety of designers. Among the things you can find from PSDTUTS are high-res texture packs and Photoshop brushes.

Freebies from Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine, a weblog dedicated to designers and developers, has a freebies section that includes a variety of freebies exclusively released for them. You can find icon sets, Photoshop brushes, buttons, and vectors – amongst other things.

Freebies from GoMediaZine

GoMediaZine, a community for designers, has an excellent Freebies section that has vectors and free Photoshop brushes.

Where do you go for freebies?

If your favorite freebie site isn’t on the list or you have opinions on the resources above – why don’t you share it with us in the comments section.

Six Revisions freebies

I’m not vain enough to include (i.e. "to pimp") Six Revisions among those excellent resources above, but in case you were wondering, you can also find a few freebies in the Six Revisions Freebie section.

Additionally, you can check out the Six Revisions Flickr Sets for free high-resolution stock textures and objects.

48 Comments

loswl

January 11th, 2009

Excellent list, some of my favorites are there,..and some :o)

Angie Bowen

January 11th, 2009

Some great resources here. I love Go Media’s freebies and Lost and Taken’s textures!

Exljbris Font Foundry has some beautiful free font.

And, just to give my own stuff a little bump, Arbenting does weekly freebies. :D

Jeremy

January 11th, 2009

Awesome post! thanks so much for gathering all this together.

Raymond Selda

January 11th, 2009

Thank you for this article. I’ve been using stock.xchng.

insic

January 12th, 2009

nice list stock.xchng, deviantart and psdtuts are really useful.

Jhay

January 12th, 2009

Great post! Thanks for sharing!

Colorburned

January 12th, 2009

My site has some great vectors, textures and tutorials http://colorburned.com/

http://twitter.com/colorburned

Sacha

January 12th, 2009

Great list ! I created a Google custom search engine that searches most of those and more:

http://www.sachagreif.com/drse/

Rob

January 12th, 2009

excelent roundup! we all love free stuff! :D +del

Farid Hadi

January 12th, 2009

Thanks for sharing this list Jacob. You could also check out fasticon.com for.. icons =)

Scott Petrovic

January 12th, 2009

Great list I am alsways looking for more websites with photos/patterns/brushes. Another one I go to is sxc.hu . Not everything is free there, but it has quite a bit that is.

Thomas

January 12th, 2009

Thanks for featuring BrushKing. We try to keep the good work :)

adrienne

January 12th, 2009

thanks for this article – really useful stuff – i already knew about some such as dafont, but the others will come in handy too! :)

Jeff Finley from Go Media

January 12th, 2009

Nice list, flattered to be included.

Creativity103

January 12th, 2009

If you are looking for something really unusual, either to cut and paste into a design or to use as inspiration then have a look at creativity103.com

We currently have 4000+ free images, textures and backgrounds; some exclusive to the site, and many contributed by our users.

][

January 12th, 2009

I am truly appreciate of this list, its quite extensive and the links are quality… your awesome for sharing such a cool list.

Thank you
][

Hubby

January 13th, 2009

excellent list – contains most of the ingredients for a great website

Matt Sweeny

January 13th, 2009

for sure morgueFILE is one of my favorites not only for graphic design pet projects but professional photographs are outstanding there too! Great list!