It’s no secret that being a graphic designer means taking up the challenging task of visually communicating the brand’s message. To meet your client’s expectations, this role requires you to don multiple hats of being a researcher, visual storyteller, and designer.

During the research, most of your work involves leveraging pre-existing assets, such as fonts, photos, mockups, icons, and more, to draft initial concepts and bring your ideas to life quickly. And having a good eye for selecting appropriate assets is half the differentiation between good and great designs.

More importantly, design resources let you focus your attention and creativity on more challenging aspects of a project. Not to mention how hard it would be to estimate the time a project would take to complete if we had to create each asset from the start.

Hand-to-god, they’ve always proved to be a blessing for me.

But out of hundreds of quality resources available on the internet, how can you tell which resources are worth your time and money? For this reason alone, I compiled this list of resources that I find particularly helpful to save you some time and needless web wandering.

Here is my recommended list of resources that are cost-effective and brilliant:

Fonts

1. Fontbrief

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Using a short brief and the personality traits of the brand you’re designing for, Font Brief enables you to find the ideal typeface. This platform was built by graphic designer Victor Bartis and art director Christian Costea with the idea that anyone working on editorial or branding projects can significantly benefit from it.

2. Velvetyne Type Foundry

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Velvetyne Type Foundry has been designing and distributing free, open-source typefaces since 2010. Velvetyne offers a stylish playground for projects with high lyrical, aesthetic, or technological value but limited commercial appeal.

Colors

3. Color Lisa

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I invest a lot of time as a creative, searching for color inspiration and palette suggestions. And It’s safe to assume you don’t have to be a designer to know the significance of color selection in the success of a design. Color Lisa lets you take inspiration from the color palettes of some of the most iconic artists ever lived. It harbors an unparalleled collection of information on the color palettes of the masterpieces of the world’s most notable artists. For instance, if you adore The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, this excellent tool provides you with every color the artist used in that specific work.

Illustrations

4. Control

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Control has an unrivaled collection of 108 customizable flat illustrations. Every illustration is a vector file compatible with Illustrator, Figma, and Sketch and the entire collection is available in PNG format for a free trial.

5. Open Peeps

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From the oldest Neolithic cave paintings to the figures in modern 3D video games, character illustration has always been and most likely always will be an essential art genre. As designers, we need character illustrations for various reasons, like while designing a poster for an event or content for social media posts. The situation may appear more difficult if you don’t have experience with hand-drawn or digital graphics. Rest assured that an easy solution exists because of Open Peeps. It has a collection of hand-drawn illustrations that can be utilized for products, marketing, comic books, user flows, storyboarding, and more.

Utility

6. Design System Checklist

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This website is a collaborative effort of a team of experts who have been working on design systems for a long time and have identified some patterns they all share. Design system checklist is a collection of best practices to help you build extensive and robust design systems.

Mockups

7. House of Mockups

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Shillington Education’s creative director Anthony Wood established the online community House of Mockups. Shillington is a one-of-a-kind design Bootcamp with campuses throughout the United States, Europe, and Australia. Under Anthony’s leadership, it remains one of the top places to become a graphic designer. House of Mockups is an excellent resource for discovering innovative mockups designed by some of the most creative minds in the industry.

Icons

8. Lordicon

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At Lordicon, you’ll find a collection of stunningly created animated icons with an extensive library and limitless integration possibilities. File types for each icon are GIF, SVG, EPS, and PNG. Additionally, they offer a stylish HTML embed option directly from the Lordicon library.

Imagery

9. Offset by Shutterstock

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Offset is a premium stock photo website run by Shutterstock that offers high-quality, royalty-free images for use in editorial and commercial work. It focuses on streamlining the user experience by using on-demand-only licensing. Unlike other stock photo repositories, only world-class photographers can contribute to Offset, as every single image at Offset is hand-picked carefully and checked for quality.

Design Blogs for Inspiration

10. Dieline

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The Dieline can be your go-to source for the most recent information and case studies in package design. Its mission is to create a global network of practitioners and support the packaging industry’s transition to more environmentally friendly practices.

Reading list recommendations

11. AIGA: Eye on Design

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Eye on design is a blog run by experts at The American Institute of Graphic Arts or AIGA. The blog engages in all aspects of communication design, including typography, interface design, UX, branding, and more. It is jam-packed with well-chosen content and insightful information.

Reading list recommendations