Design Tools For Freelancers
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and when you're a one person operation your reputation is literally everything to your freelancing business. Design can be tricky if you're not a natural born artist or design oriented person. Between logos, color schemes, web design, deliverable templates, and everything else, design choices can feel overwhelming. These tools were created to help you craft a cohesive brand presentation you can be proud of, without needing to be an expert yourself.
1 Million Free Pictures is a repository of thousands of free public domain photos! Phots are categorized by subject and you do not have to register to download free photos.
1001 Free Fonts offers a huge selection of downloadable fonts for both Windows and Mac. Top fonts are sorted by the number of downloads.
1001Fonts offers the ability to peruse a huge selection of downloadable fonts. You can either scroll through their font categories or enter a specific font name in their search engine.
Adobe Color is a color wheel that lets you create and save color schemes that consist of five colors. You can export your saved color scheme straight into Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign.
Adobe is an global computer software company. It has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, but more recent ventures veer toward digital marketing and graphic/web design software. Adobe Express is a suite of free online design tools, making it perfect for freelancers.
Adobe Portfolio is software to help you showcase your creative work. The sofware is designed to let you show your design work as collection or as a one-page website. The software includes numerous templates and hosting for unlimited pages.
AllTheFreeStock.com is a curated list of free stock images, audio, and videos. You can easily search their large database to find free stock graphic resources all in one place.
Amadine is a graphic design tool for the Mac. It provides a set of vector drawing tools aimed at both design professionals and creative amateurs.
Ancestry Images offers free stock images for genealogists and ancestry researchers. They also offer scans of old and antique prints and maps for family history research.
Balsamic is wireframing software. You can use it to generate digital sketches of your idea for an application or website to facilitate understanding before any code is written.
Behance is a platform that allows freelancers with web design careers to showcase their portfolios of visual work. One of the advantages of Behance is that it is extremely easy to use.
Bigfoto offers free photo and image download. Their collection is based on world travel. You can search by theme or continent/country.
CamScanner is a mobile app that lets iOS and Android devices be used as image scanners. With CamScanner, any documents you see in the real world can be digitized and saved right away by taking a picture with your mobile phone.
Canva is a graphic design platform that you easily create visual content without any formal graphic design training. It is available for web and mobile devices and lets you choose from hundreds of high-quality templates to create your own design.
Cargo Collective is a professional website-building platform for designers and artists. Cargo provides tools and templates to help you get your website up and running quickly and start earning money.
Coolers is color-scheme generating software. It helps you quickly create the perfect color palette for your design project.
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization of globally-accessible public commons of knowledge and culture. They provide creative works for others to build upon legally and share.
DesignShock provides a subscription to the latest icons, avatars, graphic elements, GUI packs, design sets and both web and print templates. Their bundle of resources is a great place to get the latest design elements all in one place.
DesignWizard is an online graphic design tool that enables you to create and share visual content within minutes. For the design-challenged freelancer, this is a great tool.
Designcuts is an online marketplace where creative freelancers can find quality resources like fonts, graphics, textures, patterns, and templates. Prices are reasonable.
Designmodo is an online marketplace with a selective collection of digital products for web creatives. They also provide articles, tutorials and industry news about design trends and techniques.
Dreamstime provides large collections of stock photography and a is reliable supplier of high-quality digital images at affordable prices. Since it inception in 2000, Dreamstime has evolved into a large, active community-based resource for high-quality images.
Flat UI Colors features 280 hand-picked colors. Each color is available for you to copy and paste for your next design project or presentation.
Flaticon is a search engine for free icons. It's a great resource for freelancers who need to quickly find the perfect icon.
FOCA provides free photos, videos, and templates for both personal and commercial use. You can search for images by cateory, keyword, or color.
FontShop is an international manufacturer of digital typefaces. You can try, buy, and download professional fonts from their website. They also offer some typefaces at no charge.
FontHaus is the first independent retailer of fonts in the United States. For freelance designers who want fonts that were not included (bundled) with their computers, this is a good option.
Fonts offers a huge collection of high-quality desktop and web fonts. You can try, buy and download your favorites.
Fonts In Use is a public archive of typography indexed by typeface, format, industry, and period. Their project aims to document and exame graphic design to improve typographic literacy and appreciation. This website is useful for the freelance designer who needs to do project research or type selection and pairing.
FontSpace makes it easy to find popular, new, and random fonts that are free to download. For design freelancers looking for the perfect font, FontSpace is a great resource.
Fontspring is a fair marketplace for type designers and font buyers. Their site uses a "matcherator" that lets you upload an image with type you don't know and the matcherator will find fonts that match.
Foodiesfeed is a collection of high-res food pictures that you can download and use for free. You can research their collection using categorizations of food groups or enter specific keywords into their search field.
FreeDigitalPhotos.net provides free and premium stock photos and illustrations for any commercial or non-commercial use. All images are produced by FreeDigitalPhotos' community of professional stock photographers and digital illustrators.
FreeImages lets you contribute, share, and download high-resolution photographs and illustrations free of charge. You can browse their large collection of free images, then download and use whatever suits your project.
Freepik is a great resource for free vector and graphic designs. The platform uploads over 80,000 exclusive high-quality free resources every month that you can use in both commercial and personal projects.
Freerange is an advertising revenue system to support the photographic community. Photographers get paid when users click on the ads that appear next to their submissions.
GoodUI provides UI (user interface) design templates. Whether it's for landing pages, sales funnels, or ecommerce sites, whatever you're building for your clients will benefit from a professionally-designed UI.
GraphicBurger provides free design resources. If you're looking for templates, fonts, graphics, etc. to accelerate your design business, GraphicBurger is a great option.
Gratisography is a collection of quirky, high-res, free stock images. They differentiate their collection by saying you won't find anything similar anywhere else.
The IconStore is a collection of free vector icons for personal and commercial projects. The collection is curated by professional designers.
ImageFinder uses your product data to find the best images that match your business profile. The tool imports a full set of pictures that you can choose from.
Ionicons is an open-sourced set of premium icons. They were designed to be used in web, iOS, Android, and desktop apps.
ISO Republic is a website that provides high-resolution CC0 photos and videos. Their goal is to offer highly curated collections of stock images and videos that freelancers can use both personally and commercially.
iStock is a royalty-free micro stock photography provider. Artists, designers and photographers worldwide contribute their work to iStock collections in return for royalties. iStock's parent organization is Getty Images.
Jay Mantri is a freelancer designer. According to his personal portfolio blog, he adds 7 new high-res photos every Thursday that you can use anywhere.
Jeshoots provides collections of high-res stock photos that you can download for free for personal or business use without the threat of breaking copyright laws.
Kaboompics is known as a safe and reliable source of free photos. All photos are contributed by the owner of the website, Karolina Grabowska.
Life of Pix offers high-resolution photographs with no copyright restrictions. You can search through their collections by color or by format, and then download and freely share what you find.
Linotype is a company that creates, holds the rights to, distributes, and sells fonts. They are known as a source of original fonts and hold the rights to some of the most well-known fonts.
Little Visuals is a photography service that specializes in family photography and portraits. Their goal is to capture and share life's family moments.
Livicons are animated vector icons. The website provides straightforward instructions for using their tools to customize and integrate livicons into your web project.
Lost Type is a Collaborative Digital Type Foundry. For the discerning freelance designer, Lost Type fonts is a good source for unique typefaces that you can't find elsewhere.
Magdeleine is a blog that offers hand-picked photos to inspire you. Magdeleine's collection is geared toward quality-focused high-res photos that you can download and share for free.
Marvel is an app that lets you design and create prototypes of your own apps. It's a great way to use your imagination for creating your own apps.
Mobile Patterns offers a comprehensive library of UI and UX patterns for designers and developers. You can make your selection from a professionally-curated collection that is sure to impress your clients.
MockFlow is a wireframing and product design software. It allows designers to collaborate in real time on user interface prototypes for websites and software.
Monotype is a font and technology specialist. They focus on digital typesetting and typeface design for use with consumer electronics devices.
MorgueFile is a website that provides free high-resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use. The site was created to be a free image exchange for creative professionals and teachers.
New Old Stock provides access to a collection of vintage photos from public archives. Their photos are cropped and edited for quick use.
One Big Photo offers a collection of royalty-free stock photos, images, and vectors. They have some very unique image collections.
Pexels provides free stock photos. All photos and videos uploaded on Pexels are protected under the Pexels license. This means you can use them for both personal and commercial use.
PickupImage is a collection of free downloadable high quality stock images and public domain photos. You can copy, modify, and distribute the photos, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
Pixabay.com is a free-to-use website for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, film footage and music. All resources can be used freely for almost any purpose - even commercially and in printed format. Attribution in appreciated, but not required.
Pixlr is a free photo editor with AI-powered tools that you can install as a browser plug-in. Pixlr opens almost any image format including .psd, .pxd, .webP, .svg, and many more.
Pttrns is a collection of mobile design patterns and resources for customizing application designs. This is a great resource for freelancers who like to learn more about interface design or who provide this service for clients.
PublicDomainPicture is a repository for free public domain images. You can download high quality HD photos or upload your own. The goal is to help amateur photographers make money from their hobby.
Refe offers a collection of royalty-free, high-quality, natural-looking photos. Among other themes, their site contains a collection of high-quality images of people interacting with technology.
RGBStock provides a collection of free downloadable photos and stock images. RGBsticj was created by a group of photographers and graphic artists who wanted to make a collection of high-quality images available to those who can't afford to pay for them.
Shotsnapp is a simple tool for quickly creating device mockup presentations for your app and website design. Their templates provide custom fonts, multiple device renderings, and gorgeous photos.
Simple Icons is a large collection of free glyph and flat icons. This is a great resource for you website or web application projects.
Skitterphoto offers photographers around the world the opportunity to show off and share their work worldwide. The site was founded by photographers and offers a great collection of quality free images.
Smashing Magazine is a website and eBook publisher that provides editorial content for web developers and designers. Their articles and ebooks are all geared toward helping freelancers learn the latest technology and grow their business.
Splitshire was created to give life to photographs that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. The site provides access to free stock photos for commercial and personal use. Collections grow daily.
StockSnap offers free stock photos from the Creative Commons copyright license. They have a vast collection of beautiful photos that you can search either categorically or via their search engine.
Stocksy is an artist-owned cooperative that accepts and provides royalty-free stock photography and video. Stocksy rewards their shareholder artists by ensuring they receive 50%-75% of all license fees.
Stockvault is a free photo community where photographer can upload and share their work. The images are free, but the usage depends on the image license.
Stokpic provides collections of free stock photos. The site lets you sign up (for free) to receive 10 new photos every 2 weeks.
Storyblocks, formerly Videoblocks, is a popular stock media subscription service that offers videos, images, and audio files for creative professionals. Their subscription includes unlimited downloads from a large and growing members library.
The Noun Project tool aggregates and catalogs symbols that are created and uploaded by graphic designers. The project is a resource for professionals in search of typographic symbols.
ThemeForest lets you buy and sell HTML templates as well as themes for popular CMS products like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Marketplace items are priced on the complexity, quality, and use of the file. They also have monthly free themes available for download after sign up.
TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can give it an image and it will tell you where the image appears on the web. For freelancers who want to track where there images appear online, this is a great tool.
Travel Coffee Book provides a collection of travel photos (150,000 miles across the world) that are listed under cc0. This means that you can download and share the images freely.
UI garage provides daily, hand-picked patterns for web, mobile, and tablet devices. This site is perfect for freelance designers who have a specific look they want to provide for their client. UI Garage lets you search for UIs by color, date, device type, and more.
Wikimedia Commons is a collection of millions of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. Wikimedia does not own the resources on the site - the content is owned by the individual creators of it. However, almost all of the content may be freely reused subject to certain restrictions.
Workshop provides project alerts for UX and front-end design projects. This is a great resource for freelancers to get warm leads for projects that are typically posted in places like job boards, forums, hacker news, and angellist.
Wylio believes photo authors should get credit for their work and makes it easy to do that. Wylie's tool lets you find, resize, add credit information, and embed it into your platform automatically.