Intro
I'll share with you what I think are the best free design resources.
This collection is created to help designers and developers find useful, quality, or awesome free design resources and graphic design tools across the web.
Seriously though these are super useful for not only graphic designers but also all kinds of people who even design small stuff. Check out all the awesome free design resources and graphic design tools.
The list covers awesome free design resources in this list: graphic tools, prototyping tools, and graphic generators and other web apps for designing.
These will be useful for anyone from creative beginners to experienced web designers looking for new and unique designs to add to their portfolios or businesses without having to spend a lot of time looking for them.
A growing curated list of design tools
As a freelancer, I regularly save the links that I think might be useful. Thanks to this constant and steady habit, I saved thousands of bookmarks related to design & development over the years. I will share my free design resources and graphic design tools collection. You'll find a bunch of free and freemium tools that will make your design process more straightforward.
Visual Content Creation Tools
The list of graphic design tools allows you to create awesome graphics for many platforms. Perfect for those who don't know graphic design but need it regularly. Cover images for your blog posts, customizable ready-made graphics templates for your social media posts, etc.
There are a lot of free image editing tools out there. Some offer advanced editing features and others are more casual apps. But if you're looking for a basic set of image editing tools that can help you get your job done, then here are some of our favorites.
Maybe you are creating not only visual content but also written content. Then you will love the tools that are mentioned in the awesome content creation tools.
I would also suggest you to check those visual blogging sites
Canva: Canva is the most popular and the most used graphic content creations site. It has both free and premium plans. If you need quick visual content Canva is one of the best design resources. Also, if you are a student, you can apply for the Github Student program. By doing this, you'll have many free opportunities for paid apps. Canva is one of those apps. When you are accepted to the student program, you'll get a 1-year premium Canva account. I also wrote how to do it in Turkish: Ücretsiz Canva Pro Hesabı.
Desygner: Desygner is a graphic design tool for small business owners, marketers, and non-designers who need to create marketing content such as social media posts, ads, presentations, business cards, flyers, and more. One of the best parts of Desygner is that you can access more than a hundred million Shutterstock images royalty-free.
Design Wizard: Design Wizard is graphic design software that is simple to use. It is another Canva alternative. I personally like their intuitive video editor and transparent PNG image templates.
Easil: Easil is another Canva alternative that has limited features for the free plan.
Visme: Visme is an online tool that allows you to easily create infographics. Those are very useful for visual explanations and building backlinks.
Glorify: Glorify is a Canva-like tool that specifically creates graphics for different platforms such as Product Hunt, Shopify, Fiver, etc...
Polotno Studio: Polotno Studio allows you to edit your graphics.
Projector: Projector is also another free graphic template design tool.
Taler: Taler is a relatively new tool compared with other free design resources. It is also powered by the e-commerce platform Shopify.
Crello: It is a very limited graphic design tool. Only 5 design downloads are permitted.
Artify: I personally like the illustration of Artify. Once in a while, It does not respond. However, It is now working. I should also mention that attribution is required.
Design AI: Design AI is another Canva alternative platform that has speech and video maker features.
Previewed: Make awesome animated mockups. You can export your designs in 720p for free. (Attribution required)
Infogram: Infogram is another tool that allows you to create visual stories with data.
Genially: Genially is a bit different tool other than the rest of the category. You can create interactive content and presentations with Genially.
Creatopy: Creatopy is another graphics design app that is very similar to Canva.
Adobe Express: Adobe's response to Canva's success. Adobe re-branded its Spark with considerable changes and launched it as Creative Cloud Express.
Designstripe: Designstripe is a design tool that allows non-designers to create beautiful illustrations by manipulating already existing artworks.
Simplified: Simplified is a suit of tools that makes your life easier. You can animate images with predefined effects, write your copy with AI support, etc.
Prototyping and Graphic Editing Tools
The prototyping tools are a low-cost development tool that allows the developer or the designer to quickly develop screens, reports, and forms to give end-users the “look and feel” of the information system.
Figma: Figma is awesome. It is a sketch alternative. Moreover, It is boosted by Web-Assembly technology that makes it possible to do this stuff on your browser. It is great for teams and freelancers. It also allows you to graphically edit React components. In this way, Framer is a unique design tool.
A Photoshop alternative: Photopea: Photopea is one of my favorite tools. It is a minified version of photoshop, and it is working on a browser. Try this Photoshop alternative.
Penpot: Penpot is an open-source, free prototyping and design tool that is currently at the alpha stage.
Framer: Framer stands out with its mobile and interaction prototype development. It has a web version as long as MacOS versions. React developers may know Framer Motion library which is the product of Framer.
Lunacy: Lunacy is a desktop software created by Icons8. Because of the creator company, it has built-in assets. Currently only available for Windows.
Spline: One of the best tools of 2020. Spline allows you to create 3D geometry. Moreover, It has Linux support.
Fable: Fable is a web-based motion design platform. It has a similar user interface (of course) to other motion design apps.
Haiku: Haiku is another motion design application that is recently open-sourced.
Magic Eraser: Remove unwanted things from your photos magically.
Mock Flow: A UI visualizing tool including rich templates.
Design System Tools
One of the important steps towards a unified product is creating and owning a design system on which to base the product design, realization, and development. A design system is essential to the teams from the beginning of a project until it is shipped.
Backlight by <div>RIOTS: Some of you will remember <div>RIOTS which produces useful developer tools such as webcomponents.dev and component.studio. Backlight is the newest solution to design system creation.
Supernova: Supernova allows the whole team to collaborate using the tools they love to deliver products faster. Manage and share design systems coherently across design and code to a degree never seen before.
Toolabs Design System: Toolabs is an intuitive tool that allows you to create your design system and export it with various formats such as CSS, JSON, etc. Also, It creates a web page for your design system that you can access and share easily.
Frontify: Frontify actually is more than a design system tool. It is a complete brand design suite. It has a free plan for freelancers. You can create your design guideline and design system. Frontify also allows you to create a web page to access and share your guideline. Moreover, you can develop and design a user-interface component and share the code easily. A sample guideline page can be seen below:
Diez: Tokens are great when the case designs. Diez is a tool that is specialized in creating design tokens.
ZeroHeight: You can create your design guidelines with Zeroheight and make it a single source of truth. Because it includes both design and code assets, communication with designers and developers becomes less problematic.
Free Design Resources - Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous tools are design tools that are not easily classified as others in this list. Therefore, I put them under this section.
Isoflow: A network diagramming tool that produce isometric dagrams of your network.
Paper Sizes: A comprehensive resource listing all international standards for paper sizes, dimensions, and formats.
Pitch: A presentation tool that allows for collaborative works. (Also check: Presentation Tools)
Dopely Colors: Dopey has many tools for colors.
Runway ML: This tool is literally amazing. However, it has a steep learning curve because Runway has many features that use machine learning.
Design Lobby: It is a nice-looking asset manager. You can deploy your design assets such as typefaces, icons, images, and colors, currently in a beta phase.
Squoosh: Squoosh is a one-page web app that is the easiest way to compress images. As we know, Google stated that fast opening is an important factor when ranking websites. Therefore, image compression is a must for websites that are aiming to rank higher. Considering the situation, Squoosh is an important free design resource.
Scrollbar Designer: Design your page's scrollbar. It should also be noted that it doesn't work on Firefox. You can accomplish it via JavaScript.
I hope you like the free design resources and graphic design tools. This is a growing list. Therefore, it is better to come back later.
Free Design Resources - Graphics Design Generators
These tools generate design resources for you. They are simple tools but generate effective patterns and code. Those are free design resources that you can tweak and use them.
MeshedUp: A collection of sweet meshed gradients.
Mockover: An image warping tool for your product mockups.
Apparel Mockups: This tool allows you to warp your images like it is printed on an item.
Remix by Buffer: This tool is made by Buffer and it transforms any link, tweet, or product into beautiful Instagram content.
Purple Photos: Create beautiful social media posts.
Pattern Generator: A pattern generator with some customization options.
Glitch Image Generator: Upload your image and customize the glitch effect on it.
Sombras: Do art shadows with cubes and letters.
Readme Generator: Write your readme files with an intuitive GUI.
Gradient SVG Generator: SVG generator for fluid gradient backgrounds
Social Sizes: Image and Video sizes for Social Media: This tool provides image and video sizes for a variety of social media platforms. Quickly get social media graphics templates for Sketch and Figma.
AI Image Upscaler: An AI-assisted image upscaler from Icons8.
Magic Pattern SVG Wave Generator: Magic Pattern consists of freemium tools. The link of the SVG wave generator is below, also check other tools.
Constraint Systems: The website provides 21 alternative interfaces for image editing and creating. It definitely deserves a shot.
Profile Picture Maker: A customizable profile picture maker.
Recursive Design: Typographic Palette: A typographic palette for vibrant code & UI
Glyphy: Copy & paste glyphs with ease.
Tool.Graphics: A pattern generator with more than 1000 shapes and 300 dpi.
SVG Blobs: Blobs.pack is a pack of 100+ vectorized blobs in Figma, Illustrator, and SVG formats to make your design projects pop.
Grainy Gradient Generator: An interesting tool that generates grainy gradients in SVG, CSS, or both.
Slant: Slant is an isometric graphics generator.
Snowflake Generator: Mesh Gradients: A collection of 100 mesh gradients.
3D Image Transformer: An Image transformer tool. You can rotate on the X, Y, and Z-axis, add perspective, and zoom.
Background SVG Generator: Wicked is a background SVG generator.
Poet: Tweet Images: Create awesome images from tweets.
Image Comparison Tool: An image comparison tool.
Mockfire: This web app allows you to easily create social media posts mockups.
Animated GIFs: Brush ninja is an animated GIF creator.
SVG Blobs: Blobbb: An SVG blob generator tool that creates relatively customizable blobs.
SVG Design Assets: Haikei is a suite of freemium design resource generators.
Duotone Generator: Generate awesome duotone graphics.
Material Design Icon Generator:
TryShape: TryShape allows you to get pre-made SVG shapes.
Animista: Easily copy and paste the CSS animations.
Text Column Generator: Split your text through columns by CSS.
Animated Header: This advanced tool provides animated headers with rich customization options.
Glassmorphism Generator: I personally didn't like neuromorphic so much. However, this year's trend is awesome. Probably, you are familiar with it. Here is the glassmorphism generator that produces CSS.
Get Waves: Get Waves is a web app that produces wave patterns in SVG format. Basically, it is an svg wave generator.
SVG Waves: Another svg wave generator that produces wave patterns in SVG or PNG formats.
Faux Code Generator: This app requires a link to any GitHub gist. When you provide the source code, the web app transforms it into faux code graphics.
Soft UI: Another free design resource that makes it possible to build neuromorphic style code.
Glitch Art: The glitch art generator produces glitch patterns.
Fancy Border Generator: This online design resource allows you to make fancy border vectors.
Components.ai: This design resource actually a suit. It consists of many design generator that is produced by machine learning algorithms. Gradients, color scales, Voronoi, and bootstrap color palette generator.
Material Shadow: It allows you to add shadows to your icons. You can also select predefined material icons.
Technology Bullshit Generator: If you need flashy words, then this app makes it for you. It creates a flashy but bullshit word generator.
Squircley: Squircley generates a shape neither square nor circle. You can tweak it as you want.
Shape Divider: It divides the shape :) You realized that some kinds of divided shapes is well suited on landing pages. You can do that kind of shape with this design resource.
Blobs: Decorative blob generator tool.
Omatsuri Suite: Omatsuri is not a single graphic design tool. It is actually a free design resources suit. You can find many useful graphic design resources such as triangle generators, wave generators, color shades, and color palette generators.
Blog Cover Generator: Easy blog post cover generator.
Patternico: A pattern generator.
Doodad: Yet another pattern generator
Tabbied: Doodle with generated patterns.
BG Jar: Very useful background pattern generator which can export your design in various formats such as CSS, SVG, or PNG.
PixelTrue Animated Background Generators: A free animate generator in various AI, SVG, PNG, MP4, and GIF formats.
PixelTrue Animated Illustrations: Another animated free design resource from PixelTrue.
Diagrams: A flowchart diagrams generator.
CSS Generators
Mesh Gradient Generator: A mesh gradient generator from the company behind the popular WordPress plugin CSS Hero.
Mesh Gradient: Create mesh gradients with this cool tool.
SSShape: Create custom SVG shapes while selecting points on the canvas.
FFFuel Create custom SVG lines while selecting two points on the canvas.
Non-boring Gradients: Create beautiful gradients.
CSS Buttons Generator: A dozens of buttons with copy/paste styles.
CSS Shapes: This is a CSS shape generator that provides pre-made shapes that are completely written by CSS code.
CSS Clamp Generator: CSS clamp function clamps a middle value within a range of values between a defined minimum and maximum. You can visually experiment it with this tool.
Clippy CSS Clip Path Generator:Bennett Freely's CSS clip path maker tool.
Animated Background Generator: Animate background gradients with CSS.
3D Book Image CSS Generator: A 3D book cover generator that produces CSS code.
Underline Generator: A CSS underline generator with different gradient colors and font weights.
Curated CSS Shadows: A curated list of CSS shadows.
CSS Blend Mode Playground: FilterBlend is a playground for the new CSS background-blend-mode and filter properties.
Glass UI: A free glassmorphism generator based on the glassmorphism design specifications to quickly design and customize the style properties.
Neumorphism CSS Generator: This web app allows you to create neumorphism CSS code that you tweak visually.
CSS & SVG Filter: A CSS filter tool.
Text Shadow CSS Generator: Pre-made text shadows from Mixfont. Easily copy and paste the CSS code.
Clip Path Generator: Easily create a clip-path with this clip path generator from Uplabs.
CSS Stripes Generator: SVG Shape: A simple SVG shape generator with minimal options.
Design Resources
SVG Repo: It is a free SVG repository that includes more than 300.000 vector graphics. Just bookmark it, you'll need it later.
Snoweb: You can get SVG icons in HTML and CSS.
Fluent Icons: An open source icon library from Microsoft.