Resources for free stock images, brushes, fonts, icons and more

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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8 Responses to “Resources for free stock images, brushes, fonts, icons and more”

  1. Mel says:

    Good solid list. Thanks. I hadn’t realised brusheezy also had vectoreezy – I’m off to have a good rummage!

  2. Kenneth Jones says:

    Awesome list, bookmarking this. Stock stuff is too damn expensive to buy as much as I do!

  3. let me ask- why corbis is not here? There are royalty free category in corbis that offers free pictures- It is advisable to use it? or not? I admit I use corbis and sxc website to get pictures.
    Thanks for this information…

  4. Chihn says:

    Fantastic list of stuff, I love bitbox and iconfinder! I have used those resources for all kinds of projects this year.

  5. rajiv menon says:

    great list. i didn’t know most of them before.

  6. Just a heads up… your website looks extremely strange in Safari on a mac

  7. Pintheinfo says:

    Hola :) ohh just passed by consedince while looking for some articles for my freakin college :) okay anyway nice blog Will check it out Later on ,hope you accept me as a follower. oh yeah will try to visit again :P thanks ^^

  8. carolus says:

    I don’t know if anybody’s reported this before but the browser I use doesn’t seem to be able to show that article correctly… Can you confirm that this article has been set up for Opera? Would be awesome if you could check it out, although it may come from some wrong settings on my laptop

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About Dustin Brewer

Dustin Brewer

Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout the web design portfolio.

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