Useful creative resources and tips for non-Designers in US
Don’t have any experience in design? You can still create professional-looking illustrations. Check these design resources if you are a non-designer in the US.
We often think that creative content creation is just for the artsy folk.
In the past ten years, it has almost been that way. But thanks to technology, innovation, and the internet, there are programs and software as a service (SaaS) products out there that have changed the way the game is being played. Nowadays, with a bit of resourcefulness, a vision of where you want to take your content, and some imagination, you can be your own designer. There are plenty of design resources on the web that can take the stress out of your creative processes.
Great design resources are available even to the newbie designer.
The great thing about online tools is that they level the playing field. If you don't have any design software, no problem! There are plenty of web-based applications and tools that will help you get started without having to download or purchase anything. In addition, many of these applications are free to use, so there's no reason not to try them out. The good thing is that many of these online tools are designed for non-designers, so they're easy to use and don't require any previous design experience. So if you're starting in web design or UX design, these resources can be a great way to get started.
So, here are some of the best resources for web designers and UX and web design for non-designer tools we've gathered across the industry.
Best resources for picture design
Pictures provide some of the best and most compelling storytelling out there. A picture is worth 1000 words! But the critical question is, how can you find the right images to convey your message? Thanks to stock photography sites, it's never been easier. Check some of our favorite resources for finding free and paid images!
Unsplash
Benefits: Unsplash is a website where you can find high-resolution photos released under the Creative Commons Zero license.
Photographers share their work on this site, making it publicly available for free, allowing the use of photos for any usage situation, including commercial purposes. Unsplash makes its income through space advertising, and It also benefits photographers who are commissioned to take photography projects.
In short, if you don't have a photographer or photography background, then this site is perfect for you.
Pricing: Absolutely FREE. With no attribution required for commercial use.
Pixabay
Benefits: Pixabay is a thriving community of artists that publishes copyrighted free pictures, images, films, and music. All materials are available under the Pixabay License, which ensures that you can use them without asking for permission or crediting the proper artist – even for commercial purposes.
Pixabay is a helpful website for getting pictures for any purpose. You can discover photos, illustrations, videos, sound, or vectors all in one location without paying a dime. They don't restrict you from using the downloaded material, and you can use it however you want. And as a plus, no ads are shown to you during your content search.
Pricing: Absolutely FREE. With no attribution required for commercial use.
Wikimedia Commons
Benefits: All of us will agree that Wikimedia has everything! It is a website that has free pictures, audio files, and JSON files. You can use files from this site on all of the Wikimedia projects. This is also available in all languages and includes other Wiki sites like Wiktionary, Wikipedia, and Wikinews to mention a few. As of this writing, there are more than 80 million free digital assets on Commons.
Pricing: Absolutely FREE. With no attribution required for commercial use.
Pexels
Benefits: Pexels is another website that offers high-quality photos and videos. It gives users access to over 2 million images. What sets Pexels apart from its competition is the ease of use and search result filtering.
Pricing: Absolutely FREE. With no attribution required for commercial use.
Offset
Benefits: Created by Shutterstock, Offset is a curated collection of high-quality and authentic images. All of the photos on Offset are licensed under the Royalty-Free license and can be used in commercial projects without any restrictions.
You will find beautiful photos that you won't see anywhere else on their site. These are photos of real people around the world, going about their day-to-day lives or working on their craft. The pictures are so authentic that it almost feels like you're taking your own photo.
Pricing: Each image comes with two price points: large or 300dpi images at $349 and small or 72dpi images at $249 per image. Discounts on images are available for bulk purchases of 5 and 10 image packs.
Life of Pix
Benefits: Life of Pix is a site that offers free high-resolution photos. It's also a community where photographers can meet and share their work. The pictures that Life Of Pix provides are all very professional and will add value to your projects. New photographs are added weekly. The site also features photographers and their work.
Pricing: Absolutely FREE. With no attribution required for commercial use.
Illustration Design Resources for Web Designers
Illustrations are a different yet powerful tool when it comes to storytelling. It allows for a more customized approach with the flexibility to convey the message in softer, less restrictive terms. Here are some great websites offering free and premium illustration services.
DesignStripe
Benefits: DesignStipe is all about creating awesome illustrations at zero design skill ability. The majority of the artwork is hand-crafted style with multiple situational use-cases. Their site intends to benefit the not-so-experienced designers with its simple yet powerful customization tools. With DesignStripes' help, you can take control of your characters, scenes, and storytelling.
Pricing: Free Plans are available for limited access resources, and Pro Plans begin at $20/Month.
DrawKit
Benefits: Drawkit is perfect for designers and business owners looking to create new projects with limited design skills. It gives access to around 50 free, and it has some additional premium packs available.
With Drawkit, you can download your fully editable SVG or PNG files. It also gives you a non-exclusive and non-transferable royalty-free license to download, copy, modify, and use icons and illustrations for your purposes.
Pricing: Absolutely FREE. With no attribution required for commercial use.
Vexels
Benefits: Vexels is a website that provides high-quality assets designed by artists and designers. Its primary focus is for merch-ready designs. This means you can market quickly with these readily accessible elements, from backgrounds, catch-phrases, backgrounds, and mockups.
Pricing: For merchandise plans, these start as low as $21.99 and can go up to $99 for the top tier.
Humaaans
Benefits: Created by Pablo Stanley, Humaaans is a set of customizable character illustrations intuitively designed to fit your needs. The elements require the usage of compatible design software or the built-in Blush Web Design tool (Paid SaaS). It has ready-made Illustrations that can be utilized for any kind of storytelling.
Pricing: The Content or illustration set itself is free. However, to edit, you may need to avail of the Free or Pro Plans of compatible design editing tools such as Blush, Sketch, Figma, InVision Studio, and Adobe XD.
unDraw
Benefits: Established in 2017 by Katerina Limpitsouni, unDraw's simple objective is to demonstrate that designers contribute to the open-source community and assist everyone. Moreover, it aims to make beautifully done work readily available to the general public. unDraw is being used by organizations such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Harvard Business School, and even Adobe.
Don't be fooled by the ultra minimalistic homepage of unDraw. Dig a little deeper, and you'll find some of the best realistic illustrations available on the market. It has different scenarios, variations, and characters.
Pricing: Absolutely FREE. With no attribution required for commercial use.
Open Peeps
Benefits: From the same creator of Humaaans, Pablo Stanley, Open Peeps is another take on the whole character customization approach. While Humaaans is on the quirky side, Open Peeps design is a little less quirky. Similarly, for customization, the elements require using compatible design software, or you can utilize the built-in Blush Web Design tool (Paid SaaS).
Open Peeps offers a wide range of characters and customizable individuals that allows you to create mirror images of your potential audience, market, or create a face or personality for your brand.
Pricing: The Content or illustration set itself is free. However, to edit, you may need to avail of the Free or Pro Plans of compatible design editing tools such as Blush, Sketch, Figma, InVision Studio, and Adobe XD.
Where to Get Icon Design Resources
Icons are essential in creating designs because they allow users to understand the content faster than reading text. They help guide them through content and help reduce confusion by showing what the content creator wants to say.
Concise text and the right icons convey a message much faster than just text alone. By using icons, content creators can give their readers more control over how they process information.
Here are some of the best icon resources you can explore.
Flaticon
Benefits: Flaticon contains over 300,000 individual icons that you can use in all kinds of personal and commercial projects. The sheer size of its library means that it covers a wide range of topics and industry types. It also offers filters and categories for easy searching and navigation. Whatever your project requires, Flaticon got you covered.
Pricing: Flaticon offers a vast catalog of free icons in PNG format. It also gives icons in other formats, but you must purchase a premium subscription to download those formats. Flaticon's premium subscription is 9.99 EUR per month if you're subscribing for one month, but it lowers down to 7.50 EUR per month if you avail of the premium plan for one whole year.
Icon Finder
Benefits: Iconfinder claims to be the largest marketplace for icons and illustrations with flexibility and ease. It keeps its portfolio up-to-date by adding trending designs featuring new templates, freebies, and mockups to download. It also features industry news related to design trends and creative showcases that are popular among designers who want to be informed about the latest updates in their chosen field.
Pricing: It offers a cost-effective Pro subscription amount as low as $4.50 per month.
The Noun Project
Benefits: Launched in 2011, The Noun Project offers the most comprehensive collection of icons from all over the world. You can browse over 3 million art-quality icons and photos that you can also download in SVG in PNG format.
Pricing: All of the icons are available to download for free. If the icons you want are licensed Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), they are free to use, and you just need to credit the creator of the icons properly. If you don't want to give credit, you can pay to use the icon license either through pre-paid credit, a NounPro subscription, or a single $2.99 purchase.
Nucleo
Benefits: Nucleo is compatible with both Mac and Windows. It has a library of more than 30 thousand icons that you can customize, organize, and export. It also has a drag and drop feature and in-app customization tools that allow the app to customize your icons, colors, and frames. You can also enjoy its advanced export features, so you can export multiple icons, set custom resolutions, and create icon fonts and SVG symbols.
Pricing: One-time subscription fee for individuals is $99, while you need a one-time payment amounting to $299 to give access to your team of five.
Icon Store
Benefits: It is a library of free vector icons created and submitted by talented designers across the globe. IconStore can provide different styles of icons, be it filled, lined, colored, or what have you. It also offers icons covering different categories that you may need to complete your design project.
Pricing: You can download the icons for free as long as it is for personal and commercial projects. However, if you want to redistribute the icons or make them downloadable from other websites, you need to seek the consent of the creator or designer.
Futuramo Icons
Benefits: Futuramo Icons is an Iconography System used by UI/UX professionals, developers, and marketers worldwide. It gives users instant access to more than 3000 different vectors in 16 styles that are ready to be mixed and grouped in sets. It also allows users to customize the icons and change the shape, style, size, and color to make them unique and suitable for the design theme or project.
Pricing: It is free for groups with three members, while for teams with four and above members, the license fee starts at $8 per month.
Where to Get Fonts
Choosing the right font for your enterprise or creative project is very important because you want to use a typeface that speaks sense to your audience. Not every typeface appeals to every person, so it's good to think about what message you are trying to say with your design before selecting a font.
No matter what your business is doing or what message you're trying to convey to your design, using an appropriate font is essential for making sure it makes the right impression on people.
Below are just some of the best websites where you can download the most creative and attention-grabbing fonts.
Google Fonts
Benefits: Google Fonts is one of the tools that makes it easier for people to use Google's services by providing quick access to custom fonts. It is like an online library of free design-focused fonts that can make your project stand out from the rest.
Pricing: The website offers fast and easy fonts for designers to integrate into their projects. All fonts that Google Fonts released are under open source licenses, and you can use them in any non-commercial or commercial project. The fonts are very easy to download and can be used in design projects without hassle.
DaFonts
Benefits: DaFont is an archive of downloadable fonts that you can browse alphabetically by listing, style, author, or popularity. It is a suitable font source if you're looking for free fonts with novelty themes.
Pricing: The fonts provided by DaFont are mostly free, but you can't use them for commercial use. Should you want to use the fonts commercially, you need to contact the font's author to ask permission to use their work.
FontM
Benefits: FontM is a well-organized site that offers free and premium fonts. It collects the fonts from around the web and compiles them on their site. FontM has an extensive collection of free downloadable fonts on its website that you can browse by categories, type, and style. Its website also has a lot of valuable articles about typography, which you can use as your reference.
Pricing: While there are a lot of free downloadable fonts, FontM also offers premium fonts in their store, which you can buy with prices starting at $8 per single-user license.
Free Script Fonts
Benefits: Free Script Fonts offers a collection of simple and uncluttered fonts that you can use for personal and commercial purposes. As the fonts are organized well, you won't spend much time searching for the font you need. Its website also has a search box that lets you look for your desired fonts by typing their name or any keywords relevant to them.
Pricing: The site allows users to download fonts for free. You can use their fonts as is, and you can also customize to integrate them to the type of content or material you need to produce. There are several options to choose from when downloading a font, so you won't have any issues making it work on your devices.
1001 Free Fonts
Benefits: Established in 1999, this is probably one of the oldest resources for free fonts. What is great about 1001 Free Fonts is that it has a variety of font types, ranging from blackletter to grunge. This makes it the perfect place for graphic designers looking for fonts that are best suited for the design they are working on.
The fonts on 1001 Free Script Fonts' website are categorized into different groups, which you can view by clicking on one of the four main buttons on the navigation bar. This makes it easy for you to find your desired font easily.
Pricing: Most fonts are free to use, but a few shareware fonts are included. You may check the license terms for these shareware fonts so that you can download and use them without any legal issues.
Font Space
Benefits: FontSpace is a website where you can find thousands of fonts shared by different designers worldwide. Its website is constantly updated with new fonts and is 100% ad-free.
Although there are many choices to choose from, finding the font you want is easy because you can use the search box if you already know the name of the font you are looking for, or you can also browse through the various available font categories. Fonts already on the site can be filtered by name, date, popularity, and date when it is added.
Pricing: Many of the fonts available have a license that allows personal use only. Suppose you need the professional version of a font or want to buy a commercial license for multiple usages. In that case, you need to contact the owner directly to acquire the proper license.
Where to Get Mockup Design Resources
Mockups are important UX design resources because they can give you a realistic view of how your design will look once it's implemented. There are many different mockups to use, and here are some great resources to help you get started.
Mockup World
Benefits: Mockup World is an online service that gives designers and web developers free access to hundreds of ready-to-use mockup templates. You'll find anything you need for your marketing materials at Mockup World, from iPhone, iPad, iMac, MacBook to packaging, t-shirts, signages, cars, or a billboard mockup.
The mockups are in the form of PSD files with smart objects that allow you to quickly drag and drop your content components into the image, making them ideal for showcasing apps, websites, presentations, posters, and billboards.
Pricing: Absolutely FREE. With no attribution required for commercial use.
Premium Pixels
Benefits: Premium Pixels is a collection of free design resources created and curated by UK-based Web Designer Orman Clark. The site offers high-quality resources for web designers, including Photoshop Actions, UI Kits, Web Templates, and Fonts.
One of the best things about Premium Pixels is that Clark frequently updates the library with new design resources, so you can keep coming back for fresh content. All files are available for free download, and you can use them for both personal and commercial projects.
Pricing: Absolutely FREE. With no attribution required for commercial use.
Mockplus
Benefits: Mockplus is a cloud-based prototyping tool that allows users to finish a screen design quickly through its pre-built components, icons, and drag and drop function. It streamlines the design and prototyping process while establishing consistency and efficiency. Apart from its rapid prototyping features, it also focuses on effective collaboration and scalable design systems for over two million users from different parts of the world.
Pricing: Mockplus offers a free version and free trial, but for those who want unrestricted access, pricing starts at $199 per year per user.
Freedesignresources.net
Benefits: It has a library of free mockups that you can use to make your presentations stand out over the rest. These mockups can be for print projects, apparel, product packaging, among others. For easy user experience, they can filter the mockup templates according to their compatibility with other design software, properties, and type of license.
Pricing: It is 100% FREE, so you can use whatever you want, as long as it is for personal and commercial use, and you won't redistribute or resell the items as your own.
MockupsForFree
Benefits: It is a one-stop shop for high-quality design assets crafted with care by notable artists and skilled designers all over the world, including typefaces, mockups, graphics, templates, and more. Its simple interface really means the creators are out to provide support for both experienced and newbie designers by providing awesome amounts of functional design elements.
Pricing: It is free, but make sure to check the specifications on the licenses as some elements have clear-cut usage situations such as Personal Use only, Commercial use, or 100% FREE.
Takeaway
Whether you are a beginner who's out on your design journey or an experienced designer and looking for new resources, we hope this list of tools we provided in this article will be helpful for you to start your creative design journey.
As part of your learning process, try out one (or more) of the tools we shared and see how they can help you create beautiful and practical designs for your personal and business design projects.
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