Think about it — the more beautiful something is, usually the more it costs. Today, design has become one of the most, if not the most important aspect of any product. The Apple Watch, the Tesla Electric Car, the Hermes Birkin bag — all incredibly beautiful products, all incredibly expensive. Great design will cost you — but does it have to? There are some great freebie collections out there that will help you get a great design for a lot less money.
STOCK PHOTOS
Stock photos are a great way to present your product in use or for marketing purposes, but for higher resolutions, these photos can end up costing you quite a bit. However, there are some great, completely free stock photo collections out there — they are just harder to find. But no worries — we’ve listed some of the best ones below!
Pixabay — my personal favorite, lots of various options
Pexels — great macros and lots of color fade
StockSnap — mostly artsy photos, would make great posters
Unsplash — the most art gallery-ish out of the bunch
Gratisography — if you’re looking for weirder photos, you’ll find them here (case in point)
MOCKUPS
Mockups are a great easy way to get a no-fuss design of anything you want — from T-Shirts, posters, stationary and even branding. With products, original design is definitely a requirement, but for some smaller scale projects mockups are definitely the way to go if you have a tight budget. And, if they’re free like the ones linked bellow, even better!
NumberPicture — because Excel graphs are too mainstream
Graphic Burger — stationary, T-Shirts and even stamps
Pixaden — business card mockup heaven
Medialoot — loads of different category mockups
Graphics Fuel — they have a glass bottle mockup, people
GRAPHICS
To say that photo and graphics editing software is complicated is somewhat of an understatement, especially for beginners. If you don’t have much money to spare on hiring professionals, but need a beautifully designed visual of your product or any other image, try out these great sources of free vectors, PSD and even web page templates!
Freebies Gallery — simple and elegant templates
Perfect Pixels — Apple vectors heaven
Vector.me — if you’re looking for kitsch, you’ll find it here
Vecteezy — loads of beautiful icon sets
Retro Vectors — that’s pretty much it, retro vectors
There are a lot more freebies online than you’d think. The generous talented folks who upload onto these websites definitely deserve a round of applause for making things easier, and cheaper for the rest of us. We’ll be back with more freebie collections soon and in the meantime, enjoy the ones from this post. Just remember — design doesn’t change anything, it changes everything. So make it count.
