TFrom flat style avatars, concept illustrations, or even colorful cartoons, looking at the trends in design today, it’s evident that illustrations are taking over. These days you don’t need to have any skill in creating illustrations or graphics to use one in your design. There are tons of websites for free illustration resources to suit your personal or commercial design project.
No matter what type of project you are working on, how plain or crazy it may be, there’s a website for free illustration resources available for you if you can search for it.
Why these free illustration resources?
Illustrations help to design different styles that complement the branding of your company. Illustrations describe brand messaging more than words do.
Some things to remember
- Attribution is very important: While there are a lot of free illustrations to use, it is common design etiquette to always check and credit the original creator of an illustration.
- Make it relevant: the purpose of an illustration is to tell a story, so it’s best to use one that highlights the type of service you provide.
- Be decisive: before searching through the different resources, have an image of what you are looking for. If you don’t, you can quickly become overwhelmed by the sheer number of illustrations available.
Best websites for finding and downloading free illustration resources
Once you know exactly what you want, here’s the list of best illustration resources to pick from for your projects:
1.Storyset:
Image Credit: Storyset
What is it:
Storyset filled with hundreds of illustrated concepts for your design projects. These illustrations are rendered in a smooth and beautifully designed interface that allows you to find what you need easily.
Storyset is the latest creation from the freepik Company organization, a renowned references for design resources.
How to use:
All the illustrations available on Storyset are completely free to customize, animate and download. Attribution is required though when they are used in your project. The illustrations can be edited right on the site; changing both the character and background colors before you download them in either SVG or PNG formats.
What’s exciting is its powerful online editor that allows you to animate the illustrations using different available styles. The animations can be exported in HTML, GIF or MP4 video formats.
Benefits:
Storyset offers five different styles for all the illustrations on the site; Rafiki, Bro, Amico, Pana and Cuate. You are sure to find the exact type of illustration you need from one of these styles as every illustration comes in all five styles!
As the icing on the cake, Storyset offers a plugin for Figma so all the illustrations can be used from right within the app.
2.Ouch.com:
Image Credit:Ouch
What is it:
Ouch is an illustration resource created by Icons8 to help creators who do not draw overcome the lack of quality graphics by providing free PNG and SVG illustrations from top Dribble artists for download.
How to use:
Grouped into over 45 different styles, ouch has a massive library of illustrations to choose from. All the illustrations in a style have the same design across, so you can easily pick one or two styles for your project and get illustrations that are consistent throughout your designs.
You can also filter through the different illustrations using search keywords like sign in, abstract, holiday, or you can pick from the different categories already curated by the site.
Benefits:
Illustrations on Ouch can be downloaded for free with attribution in either SVG or PNG formats. To get specific illustrations, use the vector creator available also by Icons8.
With the powerful online editor, you can create your own custom illustration from scratch by mixing and matching the different illustrations available.
Your custom illustrations can then be downloaded and used. To unlock all the amazing features and get the full experience, a pro account is needed.
3.unDraw.co
Image Credit: Undraw.co
What is it:
unDraw is a very popular design resource for illustrations used by designers and design companies all over the world. Since coming out in 2017, it has gathered a lot of users because of its simple style and straightforward layout.
How to use:
unDraw is a constantly updated collection of beautiful illustrations in both SVG and PNG formats. The illustrations can be downloaded absolutely free and used without attribution in both personal and commercial projects, this makes unDraw very popular with designers
Benefits:
Downloading an illustration is simple. All you need do is select a preferred color for your illustration, search for the keyword, and download. That simple.
You get the illustration in SVG format so you can edit them further if you want on any design application you use. If you are looking for a hassle-free, straight forward resource for illustrations, then unDraw is for you.
4.Humaaans
Image Credit: Humaans
What is it:
Humaaans is a free illustration library that has a lot of unique designs. Unlike other illustration resources, Humaaans focuses mainly on customizable illustrations of humans. The ability to mix and match between a variety of pre-designed layouts makes the illustrations on Humaaans almost endless.
How to use:
Think of it like Lego blocks; you f different parts and you can arrange them in whatever way you like to fit what your design needs.
You can change hairdo, skin tone, clothes, positions and even rotate the orientation of the illustration.
Humaaans also has a lot of different backgrounds you can choose from to match the design combination you pick. They give you all the creative control over the illustrations.
Benefits:
The Humaaans library can be downloaded and used for free with attribution offline or can be used online with the blush web app. The app works exactly how you think it would by allowing you to edit the different illustrations from a dropdown of all the available illustration components. The downloaded library works as a plugin on design applications like Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD and InVision Studio.
5.Absurd
Image credit: Absurd.design
What is it:
Absurd is a collection of illustrations that are just different. Chances are you have not come across these types of illustrations while designing. The illustrations on this site are so abstract that they can be interpreted in more than one way based on the user so it’s great for a project with a lot of different users.
How to use:
All Absurd illustrations are hand-drawn and come in a classic black and white design. The illustrations are available for download but only a limited amount is free, to access the rest of the collection, you have to subscribe and become a member. If you are a fan of the abstract, this collection is a must-have for you.
Benefits:
Unlike other illustration resources that group illustrations based on design styles or keywords, absurd groups illustrations by chapters. Each chapter is a collection of illustrations based on what the artist deems fit. But regardless, all the chapters paradoxically combine absurdity and a deep sense of childishness and naivety to create something completely absurd.
6.Drawkit
Image Credit: Dk.com
What is it:
Drawkit is a collection of simple and fully customizable SVG illustrations. The collection is constantly being updated weekly and has illustrations for all types of design projects. Drawkit is a project by designstripe. The site aims to help you quickly get your project going by providing all the necessary illustrations you may need.
How to use:
Drawkit’s illustrations come in two distinct styles, monochrome and colored. Both styles depict the illustrations the way you would use them in your project. You can further edit them to fit your style as you get both the PNG and SVG file formats when you download any illustration.
All the illustrations on the site are 100% free to download with attribution and can be used for personal and commercial purposes.
Benefits:
Drawkit curates its large collection of illustrations into over 10 different packs with some having up to 100 illustrations inside of them. Apart from serving as a website for free illustration resources Drawkit also has an icon collection section for complementing its illustrations.
Do you want animated illustrations? Drawkit features these too.
7.IRA Design:
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Image Credit: IRAdesign.io
What is it:
IRA Design is a free illustration resource that lets you create custom illustrations with pre-built components. The site offers hand-drawn sketch components that can be customized with available color gradients, infinite scalability as the illustrations are available in different formats and all are free to use under the MIT license.
How to use:
The site gives you the option to choose, play and mix 5 gradient colors to suit your desired character. The control for this is as easy as clicking on a button to change the selected parts of a design. The design components that make up the illustrations are grouped into three different collections; backgrounds, objects and characters. hese components can be edited independently and used together to create one beautiful illustration.
Benefits:
The illustrations by IRA design renders flawlessly across all devices creating a consistent user experience across all platforms. They are available for developers as optimized SVGs, and PNGs for designers and are all curated in a library of 200+ design components.
Some other icon resources to check out:
Boost your design game with these free illustration resources
There are designers out there who spend time creating beautiful art and give these to millions for free. Kudos to them!
Illustrations are useful assets for web design. Any of these resource will provide the best illustrations for design projects and You can increase their impact on the user experience by looking out for great icons to use for a design project.