10 free design tools that every designer should know
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Efficiency is essential. Over the years, I’ve put together a collection of paid and free design resources that I commonly use when I work. If you’re looking for free fonts to improve your typography, icons to modernize your designs, or stock images to inject humanity into your work — here are some free resources!
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Fontshare
I like Fontshare more than Google Fonts. There, I said it. Fontshare is simply astounding. They somehow have managed to curate a collection of top-tier typeface selections and keep it free. I have no idea how. Their typographic selection is full of excellent options.
Take a look. You might find the perfect font for your next Webflow project.
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Accessible Brand Colors
If you’re creating non-accessible websites in 2022… stop it. Check your color contrasts and follow them. I know it might feel like an extra step in your process, but it’ll quickly become a standard step in your process.
This online tool was created by Use All Five, and it’s straightforward to use.
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Feather Icons
A criminally good icon set, free and open source? How? I have no idea, but I’m not asking questions. Feather Icons are a beautiful, tastefully designed set of line icons ready for your next Figma project. Check ‘em out!
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Octopus
We use Octopus for every single site we build here at Absurdity. Simply put, it’s the best lightweight sitemapping tool I’ve found. Know a better one? Let me know. While it is a paid tool, you can create a single site for free (and then delete that site when you’re done, rinse and repeat).
The Octopus devs are amazing, too. They’re always updating the tool with new features. I’m a huge fan.
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NoisePNG
This one’s simple. Sometimes you need a nice grain texture with a transparent background. Make one here.
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Pexels
Everyone knows about Unsplash, but I don’t see as much about Pexels. Similarly, it’s a collection of free-to-use stock images, and it has a large selection. Some images are overlapped uploads with Unsplash, but it also has many unique options. Next time you’re looking for stock images for your site, take a look.
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Mixkit
For all you video creators out there, Mixkit has a ton of free assets, stock footage, and motion templates. It’s like Unsplash or Pexels for video footage. They also have high-quality music and sound effects available.
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New Old Stock
One of the most unusual free stock photo sites, New Old Stock might come in handy when you’re looking for something a bit more aged. They find interesting old images that you can use for, well, anything.
Whether for texture, inspiration, or background images, like a fine wine, their images get better with time.
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WebGradients
Sometimes you just need some smooooooooth gradients. These gradients are built with CSS, so they’re ready to copy and paste into your project. If you’re using these with Webflow, just use the hex codes to create the gradient as a background.
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Lost + Taken
Whether it’s for illustration or web, adding textures to your work can have interesting results. Lost and Taken has a decent collection of some of the common textures you might be looking for. Make something weird with them!
If you know any other free design tools, let us know on Twitter!
