(Mostly) Free Resources Every UX Designer Should Know About
These are a bunch of our favorites, add yours in the comments below.
Finding Mentorship
Design Buddies (Free)— A large and supportive Discord design community. They offer many events, panels, and mentorship opportunities.
Iterate UX (Free)— A UX community filled with designers of all different levels. They frequently have whiteboarding activities that give great interview practice.
ADPList (Free)— Great place to find mentors and attend free UX events
AIGA (Paid) — Long standing community of designers and design leaders offering mentorship, resources, and other events.
Design Tools
Figma (Free-ish)- Figma is free for students always and the gold standard when it comes to UX/UI design. There is also a free tier with limited file counts even for non-students.
PIXLR (Free) — For quick browser based photo manipulation.
Inkscape (Free) — For drawing and creating illustrations.
Blender (Free) — For 3d projects and rendering.
FreeCAD (Free) — A free (but somewhat limited) alternative to AutoCAD.
DaVinci Resolve (Free) — An incredible video editing suite for free.
Typography
Google Fonts (Free) — Great, free, and safe to use on web. Google fonts will even spit out the code needed to put into your site.
FontPair.co (Free) — A very powerful font pairing tool that allows you to match fonts and select from pre-suggested pairings. There is also a tool for sorting by font style and type.
typ.io (Free) — A curated list monthly of fonts that pair well together and are used in the wild. Tagged by industry.
FontJoy (Free) — Select and sample the way fonts pair together.
Color
Data Color Picker (Free) — Select the best colors for charts and graphs based on accessibility and number of variables.
Gradient Guru (Free) — A tool for blending image gradients.
Adobe Color Wheel (Free) — A tool for creating color schemes.
MyColor.Space (Free) — A tool for finding color schemes and gradients based on a single base hex.
Khroma (Free) — A tool for finding matching colors and color schemes. Pick 50 colors you like and let AI find a color scheme for you.
Self Hosted Site Builders
Cargo Collective (Free-ish) — Free for students and NPOs.
Indexhibit (Free) — Free simple portfolio builder.
Wordpress (Free) — You know this one. The web is built on it.
Web Hosting
Firebase (Free-ish) — Free db and web hosting (up to a point, traffic/usage based beyond free tier)
Github (Free) — Host your code for free with version control and plenty of other features and get a free front facing URL like username.github.io
Freelancing Tools
Invoicely (Free) — Generate professional invoices quickly, easily, and free.
Pricing Guide (Free) — An extremely useful guide to pricing your time as a freelance designer.
Sheets Templates for Client Tracking (Free) — Hubspot has a great resource about how to leverage free resources like google sheets for small businesses.
Stock Photos and Videos
Unsplash (Free) — Free photos for personal and commercial use.
Pexels (Free) — Free photos and videos for personal and commercial use.
Coverr (Free) — Free videos for personal and professional use.
Inspiration & Blogs
These are all free blogs with great design content, rapid fire time:
