Free Resources on the Web for Designers
As a college student who is working part-time and offering design projects for little to nothing, I don’t have much money to buy things like photos or fonts. I rely heavily on free resources and tools offered on the web. There are many lists of free sites available that include an overwhelming amount of links, but I have tried to boil it down to the ones that I personally use the most and find the most valuable (no affiliations!). This is information I wish I knew before starting college…these sites would have saved me a lot of grief!
www.sxc.hu
Stock photos are things that most designers sometimes use for making graphics. However, many times we don’t want to spend money on purchasing a quality photo, especially if it is just for the web or for smaller projects. This is where SXC comes in; it is basically a place where generous people upload their (usually) high-quality images for free. While there are other free stock photo sites out there, I have found from experience and word-of-mouth that SXC is definitely the best. I always go there first for projects that require a special photo. Make sure you check the license agreement just to be safe.
http://www.adobe.kuler.com
A web application by Adobe, kuler is a tool for creating color palettes and browsing what other users have put together. What really sold me on this site are the “create” tools; you can make color palettes that are logistically calculated to consist of colors that look good together. For example, you can select “complementary”, move one color around on the color wheel, and the other colors will move to always be complementary. Before you start a project that requires a consistent color palette for branding purposes, check out kuler and get the RGB, CMYK, or LAB values for the palette you like. Or, you can download their desktop application and have the values imported directly into Adobe programs like Photoshop or Illustrator.
www.dafont.com
As far as free fonts go, DaFont, I believe, is the best in terms of quality and variety. The site is organized into categories, and the Top 100 is useful to see what fonts are scoring big in the community. I would say the best way to use DaFont is to find fonts that are used for display (titling) purposes, not for body text or for text that will be used extensively. The kerning is usually way off, so some manual kerning is necessary at times. I recommend Bebas, Bleeding Cowboys, and Sketch Block. These particular fonts are seen frequently in the design community.
www.brandsoftheworld.com
Brands of the World is a useful site for looking up vector versions of corporate logos for companies all over the world. While you can simply search for a companies logo in Google, it will be a rasterized version that is not scaleable. Vector logos are best for high-quality design. Sometimes the logo you are looking for won’t be included in Brands of the World, and in that case, I have imported a rasterized version into Illustrator and made my own vectorized logo. This year I had to include a Pepsi logo in a project, but Brands of the World did not have the updated version of the logo, so I recreated it.
This completes my list of vital resources that I use for my projects. Other free sites that should definitely be taken advantage of are Twitter, Wordpress, Apple Downloads, and W3Schools. If you would like to see a more extensive list of free resources, you can check out this blog post that I found very helpful.
If you have any sites or free applications that you use regularly, please comment below and share with us!
Dear Miss Nickerson,
I recently became involved with a large banking and financing conglomerate that wished to obtain a new logo due to some embezzlement and fraud charges that had marred it’s old logo. They offered my four quintillion dollars to perform this redesign, and with a mere 5 minutes to go before the deadline, I discovered this blog about free resources online. I was able to find some excellent stock photos and I am proud to say that, thanks to Kate Nickerson, I am the world’s first quintillionaire! You have once again amazed me with your ludicrously amazing design expertise!
Sincerely,
Not Thadius T. Flickenbocker III Sr.
Keep up the good work with your blog, and soon you will have more readers. The above comment was hilarious.
Thank you! Getting readers has been a very slow progression, but I’m working at it.