Excellent Resources for Graphic Design Freebies

You can find a variety of useful and creative graphic design resources on the web the offer downloadables such as stock photos, textures/patterns, brushes, icons, and fonts that designers have decided to share with others in the community.

In this article, you’ll find some of the best websites to visit for graphic design resources.

Stock Photos

Flickr: Creative Commons

Flickr, the premier site for online photo-sharing and the hangout of many designers and photographers, has a section called Flickr: Creative Commons that allows you to quickly view user-submitted images that have a Creative Commons license.

morguefile

morguefile contains user-submitted stock photographs contributed by many artists. morguefile has a terrific organization scheme and thumbnail preview for quicker searches. Also check out morguefile’s very active forums to find tutorials and to converse with artists that are members of the site.

stock.xchng

stock.xhchng (also known as SXC) is a very popular photo-sharing and stock photography site with over 380,000 stock photos. And if that wasn’t enough for you, they also have a tutorials section that covers photography/graphic design topics.

Stockvault.net

Stockvault.net is another excellent photo-sharing site for designers and photographers. The community boasts almost 14,000 members and over 3,000 photographers ensuring that you’ll have more than plenty of high-quality stock photos to sift through.

everystockphoto

everystockphoto is a search engine for free photos. It currently indexes close to 5 million photos. You can sign up for a free user account so that you can take advantage of nifty site features such as the ability to save collections of photos for future reference.

Textures and Patterns

CG Textures

CG Textures is an excellent texture site created by 3D artist Marcel Vijfwinkel. CG Textures is structured to help you quickly find types of textures such as Grunge and Nature textures, but if you’re looking for something/someone specific, use the Advanced Search for more specific searches.

Squidfingers / Patterns

Squidfingers / Patterns is a collection of useful and intricate patterns that you can use as repeating CSS backgrounds or on print work. Squidfingers / Patterns is the work of graphic designer and programmer extraordinaire, Travis Beckham.

TextureKing

TextureKing is a fast-growing, high-resolution texture repository maintained by creative agency, REH3design. There are currently over 300 stock textures - usually available at 1,600 x 1,200 pixels. TextureKing is currently working on giving users the ability to submit their own textures to share.

Image * After

Image * After is a large collection of free photos and textures. The site provides images and textures that are available for personal, as well as commercial, purposes.

Lost and Taken

Lost and Taken is a blog-style repository of copyright-free stock textures created and maintained by photographer and writer, Caleb Kimbrough. Lost and Taken takes requests and suggestions, so if you can’t find something – try to send in a suggestion.

Brushes and Vectors

BrushKing

BrushKing offers a wide array of Adobe Photoshop brushes, all free for download. The site currently archives over 4,000 brushes and over 200 brush sets.

PS Brushes.net

PS Brushes.net shares beautiful and high-quality brush sets organized in a variety of categories such as the Patterns category and the Drawings category. If you’d like to see the full collection of brushes, check out the All Brushes category.

Vecteezy and Brusheezy

Vecteezy is a site that indexes free vector graphics by some of the top graphic designers in the world. Vecteezy also allows users to submit vectors to be indexed. Vecteezy has a sister site called Brusheezy which indexes free Adobe Photoshop brushes.

QVectors and QBrushes

QVectors shares and showcases free, high-quality vector images and artwork from around the web. QVectors has a sister site called QBrushes which highlights top-notch Adobe Photoshop brushes.

FreeVectors.net

FreeVectors.net is an online gallery that features free vector graphics by talented graphic artists. The vectors showcased on FreeVectors.net are available for personal and commercial use.

Icons

Iconfinder

Iconfinder is a search engine specifically for icons, developed and maintained by Glassbox. Iconfinder also has a tag cloud page so that you can visually see the most popular keyword tags.

Free Icons Web

Free Icons Web is an index of over 15,000 high-quality and free icons for graphic and web designs, as well as icons for the desktop. If you’re looking exclusively for icons in GIF format, check out the GIF Icons section.

Icon Archive

Icon Archive currently hosts 22,000 high-quality desktop and web icons. They have over 800 icon sets from close to 200 icon designers. Some categories on the site include Business Icons, Computer Icons, and Vintage Icons.

IconBuffet Free Delivery

IconBuffet, an icon foundry that sells icon artwork for web designs, has a variety of free icons in the IconBuffet Free Delivery section. Their icon sampling includes sets such as Retro Snow and Tonkawa Tiles.

Fonts

dafont.com

dafont.com is a repository of public domain, freeware, shareware, and demo fonts from some of the top font designers and foundries. With excellent organization and searchability features, it’s a great resource to visit for free fonts. Check out the Top 100 to see the most popular fonts on the site.

UrbanFonts.com

UrbanFonts.com is another excellent resource for top-notch, high-quality free fonts. The site currently indexes over 8,000 freeware fonts. You can find the most popular fonts by going to the Top 100 Free Font Downloads page.

Better Fonts

Better Fonts has a large collection of free fonts organized alphabetically and in several categories that include Retro fonts, Graffiti fonts, and Handwritten fonts. The site’s unique feature is that they provide live previews of all the fonts so that you can test the fonts before downloading and installing them.

General Resources - User-submitted, Search, and Blogs

deviantART

deviantART is the premier community for graphic artists. The downloadable graphic design resources are from community members and you will find absolutely everything in deviantArt, including vectors, brushes, textures, and much more.

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository that takes user-submitted publicly-available and freely-licensed media content. Wikimedia currently hosts over 3.7 million individual files organized several ways such as by topic (i.e. Art and People) and by type (i.e. Photos, Symbols, and Drawings).

Creative Commons Search

The Creative Commons Search by the Creative Commons organization is a search engine for CC-licensed media files. It allows you to search various sites (such as Flickr and Google) all in one convenient spot.

Freebies from BittBox

Designer Jay Hilgert offers a host of freebies on his design blog, BittBox. He has a regular post series called "Free Texture Tuesday" (here’s one of them) where he shares useful textures every Tuesday.

Freebies from Blog.SpoonGraphics

Graphic and web designer Chris Spooner offers a host of freebies along with useful and informative blog posts on the topic of design. You’ll find a variety of freebies such as the wildly popular Hand Drawn Doodle Icon Set and Wavy Vector Ribbon graphics.

Freebies from PSDTUTS

PSDTUTS, a site that gives Photoshop tutorials and information, has a growing freebie section submitted by a wide variety of designers. Among the things you can find from PSDTUTS are high-res texture packs and Photoshop brushes.

Freebies from Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine, a weblog dedicated to designers and developers, has a freebies section that includes a variety of freebies exclusively released for them. You can find icon sets, Photoshop brushes, buttons, and vectors - amongst other things.

Freebies from GoMediaZine

GoMediaZine, a community for designers, has an excellent Freebies section that has vectors and free Photoshop brushes.

Useful Websites for Graphic Design Textures and Patterns

Patterns and textures, when applied correctly, can produce amazing and truly unique designs. Typically, they are used for site backgrounds, but can also be used as repeating patterns on site components such as the header and the footer. If you use right type of patterns it can really improve your site visually for the viewer.

In this article, we share 20 excellent sites where you can find and download seamless textures, patterns, and tiles free of cost.

1. Seamless Textures

Seamless Textures, as the name of the site implies, provides high-quality textures. Defined by the site, a seamless texture "can be repeated infinitely without showing any edges. They are primarily used in 3D design, website backgrounds, graphic design, and desktop wallpapers".

2. Pattern8

Pattern8 has a gallery style thumbnail layout so that you can quickly view a large amount of patterns in one page at once. The site also has a nifty filter feature that permits you to narrow down what you see by color.

3. Kaliber1000

Kaliber1000 has a beautiful and distinctive collection of pixel patterns, patterns crafted in the style of pixel art.

4. PatternCooler

PatternCooler is an excellent site for getting seamless patterns. With each pattern featured, you’re able to modify the color, rotate and resize their resolution, and save them to your PatternCooler account (if you have one).

5. Ava7Patterns

Ava7Patterns provides beautiful patterns for you to download. You can search patterns through the site’s collection of over 1,200 patterns by color or by shape.

6. Vector Valley

Vector Valley, a resource repository for vectors, has a section on patterns that provides simply gorgeous, vector-based background patterns.

7. The Variant

The Variant is a design hub where you can download patterns for use in designs. The patterns are grouped into useful categories such as Geometric and Striped so that you can swiftly find what you’re looking for.

8. One Odd Dude

One Odd Dude has a Textures section on the site with a large variety of stock textures that you can filter by category and order by popularity, user rating, and the date it was published.

9. GRSites

GRSites is a directory-style resource center for background textures. They’re one of the (if not the) biggest archive of background patterns on the web.

10. Background Labs

Background Labs features many backgrounds for you to download. They have a tag cloud search feature so that you can easily search background textures by keyword.

11. Portfelia

Portfelia is the personal site of designer Nazan Dedeoglu. The site also provides a beautiful array of graphic design patterns. Read the terms of use for them before using the patterns.

12. Rainbow Row Graphic

Rainbow Row Graphic provides a solid set of great-looking patterns and tiles that you can download. They provide two main types of patterns: Plaid and Patterned Tiles (and they’re further subcategorized into various logical groups).

13. Templateyes

Templateeyes offers over a hundred beautiful background patterns for you to download and use.

14. Better Textures

Better Textures is a collection of free, high-quality, and original seamless background textures. They organize the collection into groups such as Burlap and Dry Brush.

15. Patterrific

Patterrific is a blog-style site that features beautiful and note-worthy graphic design patterns, alongside helpful posts that showcase the users’ designs.

16. Patterns of Change

Patterns of Change, by Liza Phoenix, features unique and truly brilliant graphic design patterns such as this pastel mushrooms pattern.

17. Background Archive

Background Archive is a showcase of background patterns that you can download. They have an excellent search feature on the right-hand sidebar so that you can find precisely the background pattern for you.

18. Gallerie

Gallerie is an excellent German site that features downloadable patterns. Hint: since the site is in German, you can use Google translate if you need it.

19. Citrus Moon Pattern

Started in 2004, Citrus Moon Pattern provides original graphic design patterns. The site updates stopped around 2005, but patterns were featured almost every day, so there are a lot of patterns to find there still.

20. Pattern Head

Pattern Head is a blog-style site that features beautiful graphic design patterns such as beautiful vintage patterns.