Most designers don’t like spending a lot of money on stock photography or font discs, so there are numerous web sites available that offer quality, free stock images, fonts, icons and more. You have to be careful with some of the sites, you don’t want to get yourself in a legal mess by using something copyrighted in a commercial project. The sites I have listed here claim to adhere to copyright laws.

So without further adue here is a the list of free resources for designers:

Free stock photography sites for designers

When it comes to stock photography you will be hard pressed to find quality stuff for free, but there are three really good resources for finding stuff that will work with your design project.

1. Stock Exchange

This service is excellent and through a little searching you can find some really high quality stock photography for free.

2. Flickr

Some people try and avoid Flickr for stock images but if you search for creative commons liscenced material you can actually find some pretty decent stuff. Just make sure to check if it can be used commercially.

3. Brusheezy

This site has quite a few things available on it, there are patterns, textures and brushes available for free to download. This site doesn’t have a huge selection but a lot of what it does have is quality content.

4. Vecteezy

Vecteezy is done by the same people that do Brusheezy but they have a lot of really great vector art to download for free. The selection is much larger then on Brusheezy and there is a lot of quality content on it also.

Free brushes for designers

Photoshop Brushes are extremely useful in design, whether it be grunge brushes, or nature brushes there are uses for them within designs that really add that detail to the design necessary to make it a great one.

1. Brusheezy

This is a great site to find some good quality brushes

2. DeviantART brushes

DeviantART is an excellent source for just about anything that you need for designing. There is a wide assortment of available stock stuff and a fantastic community that creates a ton of awesome designs.

3. Bittbox

Bitt has a ton of great articles and he releases vector art and brushes frequently to his readers, a simple search of his site will turn up a vast amount of resources for designers.

4. TutorialBlog

This is just a generally good article that lists a ton of free brushes of all varrying types. A great list that deserves some credit for coming up with so many fantasticsources for free brushes to use in photoshop.

Free fonts for designers

1. dafont

I use this site to find good quality fonts very often, it is handy because it has such a wide assortment and it is organized very well. Also it has a system that allows you to type anything you want and then see it displayed in the font of your choosing. This can be really handy for designers.

2. Urban Fonts

This is a great site to find fonts, huge selection of free fonts and are available in Mac and PC versions for nearly all of the fonts.

3. 1001 Free Fonts

Another great resource for free fonts for designers to use in designing.

Free icons for designers

Icons are used in web design so widely lately that you can’t have a list of great designer resources without including some sites that have huge and awesome collections of free icons for designers.

1. IconFinder

This site is extremely handy, it has a simple google-esque interface that allows you to quickly search for icons that have been tagged by users. You can find just about any icon you need extremely fast.

2. Icon Archive

This has a huge selection of icons, it is a little difficult to navigate and it is based on icon categories but you can find some interesting icons on this site that are free.

That concludes my list of resources for designers, I have added most of the sites that I use regularly to find quality stock stuff for free. I think I included all of the catagories that are of use to everyone. If anyone can think of another relevant catagory I will add it to the list. Also, you may want to book mark this with delicious for reference in the future.

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