As a marketer or any other professional working with visual assets, you face a challenge now and then, don’t you? I mean the need for reputable and up-to-date resources to find stylish photos, icons, and other visualizations to make websites and content design bright.
The big chances are that you’ve got some free photo storage or digital photo library for this already. Indeed, websites with free pictures are many, but the problem with most of them is that they share similar content.
When I write an article or structure a user-friendly website page for my audience, I need much more than a beautiful featured image. I need icons, sometimes fonts, and other graphics. Plus, I can’t just take a picture from any free photo storage: I need those with a Creative Commons license.
Yes, it’s easy to get lost in a bunch of resources offering free design content today. That’s why I’ve gathered all the best in this article for you to get everything in one place.
Let’s check them out together!
10 Free Photo Storages with Graphics
Below you’ll find the list of resources to download various graphic content for personal and commercial use. Free photos, vectors, brushes, gradients, and styles — it’s the paradise for designers and marketers in need of unique content and data visualization.
1001 Free Downloads
The creative team behind 1001FreeDownloads finds the best content for designers throughout the internet. Here you’ll find thousands of free wallpapers, fonts, vectors, photos, icons, and more. But keep in mind: There’s a limit for downloads here: You can’t use more than 50 files from this resource per day.
Free Design Resources
Artists and professional designers from all over the world gather and share high-quality visual content here. The collection of free fonts, templates, mockups, photos, graphics, and add-ons is enormous. Also, the team of Free Design Resources invites others to submit their freebies to the website, to help each other with content creation.
Freepik
This one is a massive library of free photos, vectors, icons, and PSDs. The only request here is to mention the author of a visual you decide to use. Besides freebies, visitors get the opportunity to submit their content to the website and earn some perks for their creative work.
GraphicsFuel
Rafi is a graphic designer and artist behind this website. He’s been creating and sharing free and premium design resources since 2010, also posting articles, hand-picked photos, and other visual assets to fuel your design needs. GraphicFuel is full of graphics, PSD files, UI kits, templates, mockups, icons, etc. The author invites others to contribute their freebies too.
Smashing Magazine
In their “Freebies” section, you can find dozens of free photos, icons, PSDs, brushes, vector kits, and other tools for designing unique visual content for your projects or brand identity. No restrictions are here, so you can use anything for personal or commercial needs.
Vecteezy
Besides thousands of new vector files, you’ll get free photos and video collections on this website. All the content is easy to search by categories, with the most popular ones to spark inspiration. The visual files update every week here.
PixelBuddha
The PixelBuddha team works on design product development. They create free and premium resources for the professional community, and they invite you to try their freebies for personal or commercial use. Here you’ll find photos, fonts, UI kits, icons, and more.
Dbfreebies
Dbfreebies.co is a collection of the best design content from Behance and Dribble. More than a thousand mockups, fonts, templates, photos, and UI kits are here. Feel free to sort by updates and popularity.
ISO Republic
This one is a massive collection of photos for your blog, social media, or virtual event content strategy. Choose among thousands of free high-resolution photos and videos on different topics. All the content goes under a CC0 license with no restrictions for downloads, edits, or shares.
Barnimages
Two photographers from Latvia launched this website in 2015 in the hope of redefining traditional free photo storage. They update the collection of high-resolution photos every week, and their mission is to avoid duplicating stock photography. Hundreds of beautiful images are here to use for free, but the webmasters appreciate donations.
7 Free Resources for Web Fonts
Most free photo storages also provide fonts in their collections, but some great resources mainly specialize in this design element. Please check below and choose those fitting your design needs most.
1001 Fonts
The library of 1001 Fonts contains more than 15,000 different items. You can find fonts by size, license type, and topic. Also, you can customize fonts here: change their colors and sizes in one click.
Abstract Fonts
More than 13,000 free fonts are available for downloading here. Search the library for different categories, designer names, font types, and more. Check if a font is available for commercial use, and if so, you can download its CSS code in the archive.
Font Squirrel
Font Squirrel is an aggregator of fonts available for both personal and commercial use. If you see the “Earth” icon, it means you can build that font on a website via CSS. This resource also has a tool known as Matcherator: You can download a picture with a text there to find out its font’s name.
Font Storage
The collection of Font Storage has 650 items by types: decorative, monospace, serif, and sans serif. Each font has its tag here (retro, gothic, etc.), so you can quickly find the one you need.
Befonts
Befonts is a catalog of free designer fonts. You can find more than 5,000 fonts there, and about 100 of them are Cyrillic. You are welcome to sort fonts by category, popularity, and name.
New updates come regularly. Although all fonts are free here, some are allowed for personal use only. Read file descriptions carefully before downloading.
FontSpace
Visit FontSpace if looking for 30,000+ free fonts for your projects. Tags and previews are available, and you can show the search result to your colleagues by generating a permanent link there.
Pinspiry
The “Free Fonts” category of Pinspiry offers around 900 free fonts for personal and commercial use. You’ll find serif, slab, script, sans, and display fonts to inspire your projects and satisfy your design needs.
Websites to Find Stylish Icons
And finally, here go the icons. I know that such resources are many, but I did my best to choose the best and most often updated with new content for your design needs.
Dryicons
The Dryicons resource comes from designers and programmers’ team, sharing more than 5,000 icons in 77 sets. It’s easy and comfortable to look for files here. The only thing you need to do for free usage is mention and backlink to the source.
Entypo
More than 400 premium icons from Daniel Bruce are waiting for you at this resource. All the content has a Creative Commons license, so don’t forget to mention the author if you’re going to use his icons for design needs. Entypo collection is open for both personal and commercial use, though some files are available for personal usage only. Read the license carefully before downloading icons to your computer.
Flaticon
Flaticon is free storage from the creators of Freepik. There are 500,000+ vector icons on the website, available for download in PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD, and BASE 64 formats. Before downloading, you can change an icon’s size or color. Free use is OK if you mention the authorship.
Icon Archive
This resource is massive: More than half of a million free icons in almost 2,500 collections “live” here. Please use tags and filters to find the required icons by style, size, type of license, and category.
Good stuff no nonsense
Developed and supported by Agata, a designer/illustrator from Poland, the website shares awesome free vector icons and icon packs. All the items are hand-drawn, easy for content curation, available for personal use, and downloadable in SVG or PNG format. If you enjoy Agata’s style, you can also check her commercial sets of illustrations.
Icons8
More than 50,000 regularly updated icons are waiting for you on the website. Free usage has some limits: PNG of maximum 100 pixels only, with a backlink to the source. Unlimited access is for subscribers only. Thanks to a user-friendly interface, it’s comfortable to search icons by categories, formats, and sizes. Icons8 has a mobile app where you can change icons’ colors and drag them to Photoshop in one click.
Icofont
This resource offers thousands of curated design icons on different topics: food, medicine, sports, education, and more. You can download them as separate files or collections. The icons are black-and-white, and they are font, not vector ones; that’s why you’ll find CSS and TTF files, not SVG in archives.
IconBros
IconBros collects 950+ icons from dozens of categories (SEO & marketing, business, emoticons, etc.). There is a search, but you can’t download the entire collection or archive in one click. Icons are available in SVG and PNG for personal or commercial use, but please don’t make an icon a part of a logo, trademark, or service mark.
Iconstore
Iconstore offers 200+ icons in 28 categories: travel, sport, social media, communication, etc. There’s not so much content at this resource, but it all comes from first-class designers. Icons are available in SVG for personal and commercial use. Attribution isn’t necessary but welcomed.
Final words
Now you have 25+ more websites to collect visual content sources for your design or marketing projects. With so many free photo storages available online today, it still can’t hurt to have a few alternatives in the pool, don’t you agree?
I hope this article has inspired you to find and use new resources for more comfortable work. And Pics.io will help you gather, keep, and manage all the chosen visual content in one place.
By Lesley Vos, Content Specialist and Blogger at BidPapers
