The Best Sites for Free Stock Photos, Graphics, and Creative Content
Updated December 8, 2020
Finding great fonts and graphics for marketing collateral without a sizable marketing budget can be challenging. However, there are several websites that make the creative side of your business more accessible. Creating compelling creative content is critical. We just used 5 C's in a 6 sentence! Here are some of our favorite free/low cost resources for creating marketing collateral.
Free Fonts and Graphic Design Elements
Powered by Creative Market
Every week (on Mondays), Creative Market releases six free creative goods that you can download and use royalty-free. Creative elements include fonts, illustrations, graphics and more. Hungry JPEG also has free and paid creative assets to download.
Font Squirrel has a collection of royalty free fonts.
Love SVG has a collection of free SVG files that are popular among DIY crafters.
Free Photo Editing and Graphic Design Tools
Canva is a wonderful, easy to use tool for creating social media posts, banners, infographics and more. Choose from a variety of templates such as Facebook banners or Instragram posts, and add text, graphics, and images to your design with the correct dimensions built into the template. You can also create custom dimensions if a template doesn't fit your needs. Canvas has a variety of fonts to choose from and many of the graphics, illustrations, charts, and media you can add to your design is free. Paid elements typically cost $1 each. Easil is a similar program to Canva and recently released a GIF maker, where you can create your own animated gif using text, images, and shapes. Easil is a similar web app for creating graphics similar to canva. There are multiple plans including a basic free plan.
Adobe's Pixlr editor is a free photo editing tool that comes with a variety of overlays and styling filters.
Photype allows you to search photos and add type to them.
Free Stock Photo Sites
Finding royalty-free images that you can legally use for business is getting easier by the day. While simply filtering a Google image search by usage rights is easy, it isn't always accurate.
Kaboom Pics has a variety of high resolution stock images, as well as articles and mockups. Freepics and Pixabay are also good options.
An additional list courtesy of Lifehacker:
Resource Cards: Catalog of free resources including stock photos, icons, and tools for Photoshop, Boostrap, WordPress, web development, and SEO
Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels, FreeImages, and Stockio: Free stock photos, all suggested by redditor NerdFerby. We use a lot of these at Lifehacker.
Librestock: Metasearch that combines several of the above image libraries
Awesome Images: A list of over 30 more image libraries
Subtle Patterns: Background pattern images
Placeholder.com: Simple placeholder images marked with their width and height, at any measurement
Flaticon, Iconfinder, Noun Project, and Font Awesome: Free and paid icon sets
DaFont, Font Squirrel, and Google Fonts: Downloadable and embeddable fonts
Lost Type Co-op: Small collection of pay-what-you-want fonts
Loading.io: Customizable loading animations