As a designer, it’s important to have good resources in your wheelhouse. One of the best pieces of advice I can give is to use the plethora of free resources and tools that are out there. There are some things that you can get from stock sources that will save you hours of work. Here are some of the best design resources I’ve come across over the years.
Where the best designers go to find photos and graphics
This site is a stockpile of stock image sources. I have found images for many projects from sources on this site.
Adobe Color
Formerly Adobe Kuler, Adobe Color is a great resource for creating color schemes and saving them to the libraries of your other Adobe products.
Book Cover Archive
This is a great resource for amazing book cover design. It allows you to search by book title, author, and designer.
Fonts In Use
Fonts in Use has a great typography archive. It’s a great source of inspiration when you’re trying to find a good font pair.
Dribbble
Dribbble is a community of designers sharing screenshots of their work, process, and projects. It’s a great place to showcase your work, find designers for projects, and find jobs in your industry.
Flickr Creative Commons
Flickr Creative Commons is great for finding stock photos without worrying about infringing on copyright laws.
Lynda.com
Lynda.com is a place to improve your skills. It has thousands of tutorials made by experts in many fields. Lynda is a subscription-based site, but it is well worth the price!
Design Cuts
I found Design Cuts recently, but it is a great resource for free and cheap design elements, assets, tutorials, and mockups.
Behance.net
Behance is another great portfolio site. It’s a great place to share your designs and get and give feedback from and to other designers.
Creative Bloq
Creative Bloq is a great site for design news, tutorials, videos, and information.
Panda
Panda is a curated feed for your specific interests within the industry. It’s a great source of news and resources.
There are many other resources out there, and these aren’t the only ones I use. They are some of my favorites! If you know of any other great resources, feel free to add them in the comments!
Sheana Brown 