"Good artists copy. Great artists steal". A quote attributed to Steve Jobs, who may well have "stolen" it from Pablo Picasso. Use inspiration by taking what you've seen and recombine it into something new.
pinterest.com
Not sure where to start? Start here. The world's top visual social media platform positions itself as the place to get ideas, so naturally it has inspiration in abundance.
Freedribbble.com
Whereas Pinterest pulls in content from all over the web, Dribbble focuses on delivering inspiration through work from designers and creatives only.
FreeYour brain can process an entire image before you've even read a single letter of the average word. It's that fast because we relied on what we saw for survival long before written language was invented. Instead of trawling through Google Images, try these curated collections for higher quality photographs.
unsplash.com
Ditch Google Images for the all-but-most-obscure searches: Unsplash is one of the premier places for professional quality and free-to-use photographs. With high resolution downloads, pixelated images will never have a place in your designs again.
Freepexels.com
A very similar site to Unsplash (in fact the website design is uncannily similar), you'll also be able to explore and download professional-quality photographs. One bonus is that it also has stock videos to download too, something Unsplash doesn't have.
FreeKeep your audience visually engaged whilst maintaining simplicity by using illustrations. Coming in many different styles, be sure to stick to one to keep consistency in your design.
freepik.com
Freepik has a wealth of illustrations, from the hyper real to the minimistically simple. If using for free, remember to give credit to the original creator in your design.
Free tier Paid contenthumaaans.com
This site gives you access to a mix-and-match library of "Corporate Memphis" people illustrations, a friendly style that's exploded in popularity in the last 5 years.
Free tier Paid contentblush.design
Blush houses a library of mix-and-match illustration sets in myriad styles. When downloading on the Free tier, the download size will be limited but it should cover most purposes - attribution isn't required.
Free tier Paid contentdesigns.ai
Head to the GraphicMaker on this site and you'll have access to a curated set of illustrations in a number of different styles with colours that can be customised. If using for free, make sure to attribute the image back to Designs.ai.
Free tier Paid contentUse icons to communicate information quickly through accessible and almost universally understood pictorial descriptions of words, phrases or concepts.
flaticon.com
Owned by the same company as Freepik, Flat Icon is a teasure trove of icons that you can use for free if you provide attribution to the original creator.
Free tier Paid contentfontawesome.com
Although "font" is in the name of this site, it's all about icons. The free and paid tiers together house a library of nearly 8,000 icons, however even without paying you still get access to over 1,500 of them.
Free tier Paid contentfonts.google.com
Google contribute a lot to advancing design and this library brings you over 2,000 completely free to use icons. They also come in five different styles, giving you greater control over personalising your designs.
Free"It's not what you said, it was the way you said it." Typography refers not just to fonts, but also their styling and positioning, which can convey different subconscious messages to your audience. Check out these resources to create distinction from the default Calibri, Arial or Times New Roman.
fonts.google.com
Google is back again with another huge contribution to visual design. Google Fonts completely changed the landscape when it came to website typography and you can use their huge selection of fonts in your designs for free.
Freefontsquirrel.com
Styling themselves as a "free font utopia", Font Squirrel does the hard job of finding fonts that are both high-quality, but also free for commercial and non-commercial use.
Freefontspace.com
With over 88,000 free fonts, Font Space has a library of galactic proportions. Not all the fonts are free for commercial use, but they're well labelled and can be easily filtered to show only those that can be used commercially.
FreeColours, both together and separately, convey powerful non-verbal messages, some originating from an evolutionary standpoint, others from more recent cultural trends.
canva.com
Colour can be a tricky design element to execute, but with tools like this from design app Canva, you'll be walked through the basics of colour theory and can quickly customise a ready to use palette for your designs.
Freecoolors.co
This truly epic tool helps you either create your very own colour palette through a generator or serves you the top trending user generated colour schemes as inspiration for your own designs.
Free