Free design elements and resources can save you a lot of time when rebuilding assets from scratch. If you search carefully enough, you can find everything from icon packs to UI kits and free photos.
Over the years, free resource sites have come and gone. The best climbed to the top & that’s what we decided to cover in this article. We’ve compiled a list of the seven best free resource sites on the web for every program from Photoshop to Sketch to Illustrator.
No matter what you are looking for, there is a good chance you will find it on one of these sites.
Dribbble
Dribbble is by far the best resource for anything design-related. This is an invitation-only social network for designers to share your portfolios and recent projects. Many designers also use this site to promote their free graphic design elements. Some designers post them directly to Dribbble, others link to their blog for direct download. But anyway, you can find tons of amazing free resources right on the Dribbble search page.
This site is so chock full of free resources that there are other websites out there just to curate Dribbble’s free assets. The two sites Fribbble and DB Freebies are great examples of this. Some designers also use Behance to release free resources. However, this site is a public network so anyone can join. This means there is a lot to sift through if you’re looking for specific free items like UI kits.
We mainly recommend Dribbble because it is clean and filled with the best design elements. This should be your first stop when looking online for free digital design resources.
Designer Mill
The Designer Mill site is a new addition to the web, but it is another very valuable tool for designers. This site curates free resources from everywhere, so it looks more like an aggregator for digital assets.
You will find many PSD files here, but also many Sketch files. This program is much cheaper than Adobe and is quickly becoming the preferred choice of digital designers working with OS X. Categories are listed in the sidebar, so you can browse through them to find what you’re looking for. I think the interface could be updated to make browsing easier, but this aggregator is one of the best for free resources of all file types.
Freebiesbug
Another great site is Freebiesbug, which also lets you browse resources by category. You will find links in the sidebar for almost everything:
- PSD
- AI
- Sketch files
- Fonts
- Snippets of code
The PSD category has the most content. Most of them are icons and digital layouts, but there are also a large number of UI kits and interfaces for mobile applications. Everything else is much less compared to the above, although new free resources are published constantly.
Freebiesbug is one of the most useful resources for free assets, thanks to the excellent quality of the submissions. You won’t find junk here, as all the assets on the site are editor-checked and only published if they are of high quality. But this site also acts as an aggregator, so the download buttons take you to the source of free resources.
PSD Repo
The best thing about PSD Repo is its clear organizational structure. Each resource has its colored icon so you can quickly browse the archive pages looking for the assets you want. Their search function is also very good, and they have tons of free offers that you usually don’t find on other sites.
However, this website is another curated archive, so it doesn’t host the files directly (not all of them anyway). Those that are hosted outside the site are marked as such on the download buttons. If you can’t find what you want on Dribbble or other PSD sites, check out PSD Repo. It is a good alternative resource that is not large in volume but has a lot of variety.
Sketch App Sources
Every Sketch user should know about Sketch App Sources. This is the perfect website for absolutely all Sketch software. Tutorials, hotkeys, plugins, and free design elements are all part of this powerful website. It’s more like a portal to work with Sketch, and it’s a user-friendly site for both beginners and experts.
Pretty much every free Sketch element that you can find on the internet is listed here. The site contains the most complete gallery of all free design elements – layouts, icon sets, application icons, etc.
Iconfinder
When you search on Google, you can find thousands of free icon sets. But it seems almost impossible to search among them, as Google SERPs only show ten items per page.
Fortunately, there are better options like Iconfinder. This free web app acts as a search engine for open source icon sets. You can search for any specific icon you are looking for (eg: magnifying glass), or you can search by icon style (eg: flat, material, gradient). Each search page includes results from different sets of icons so you can browse and see which ones are grabbing your attention.
Also, Iconfinder offers its premium icons. It will cost you money, but you probably won’t need it, as you can find millions of free icons with just a few keystrokes.
This site is quite small, but also extremely focused on a specific topic. It’s a huge collection of free digital designs including PSDs, fonts, vectors, gradients, PS layer effects, and more. With over 4,000 subscribers, this site is surprisingly active. Each link goes to the main source of the free resource, so you have direct access to hundreds of design assets right at your fingertips.
Most brush sets and fonts can vary in quality, so you may run into a lot of junk before finding something worthwhile. But many of these resources are not displayed on other sites, so they are exclusive to the Reddit service. This makes it a valuable resource to sign up and check out a couple of times a week.
There are other smaller sites on the internet, but many of them force you to subscribe before downloading, require you to share on social media, or mix too many premium resources with free ones. Therefore, we hope this collection offers enough to get you started looking for and downloading any free new products for your next project.
