A good workman never blames his tools, and neither should a designer. With a Designers role becoming evermore expansive, we’ve hand picked the very best resources to help you streamline your workflow and take your design prowess to the next level.
Using illustrations can humanise your business and make you more approachable to clients. These websites offer vector illustrations you can quickly customise and personalise, making them perfect for any emerging brand.
Use a generator to create custom illustrations
A huge library of vector based illustrations.
We all know it pays to be meticulous when planning a piece of content, although knowing where to start can be tricky. Using these tools, you can discover the type of questions and information people are searching for, and even unearth new niches in the process
Get instant, raw search insights, direct from the minds of your customers
He Content Idea Generator automatically generates hundreds of ideas for blog posts
Good photography is at the heart of good design. The problem is that a large proportion of todays stock imagery not only looks obviously staged and cliché, but is also expensive to buy and use.
Thankfully, the sites listed below offer a huge selection of premium photography, all for free! Its worth noting that the large majority of these sites are copyright free, meaning you can edit and manipulate for both personal and commercial usage, however some images may require attribution.
High resolution free imagery
Curated photography for you to use in your next creative project
Download free, high-resolution images
Stock imagery and video produced by content creators
Stunning free images & royalty free stock
Hundreds of high resolution images added weekly
Gorgeous, High-Resolution, Free Photos
Download free, high-resolution images
Selecting the correct font can be make or break for a project. These tools will provide you access to font libraries, glyphs and pairing tools, ensure you have beautiful well thought out typography throughout all of your designs
Quick access to a library of copy & paste glyphs
A large selection of fonts and typefaces
Quickly cycle and experiment with hundreds of different font pairings
Upload a photo to identify the font being used
Want something to make your website stand out? Try incorporating some of these 3D elements. From customisable icons to avatars and animations loops, these are guaranteed to bring a whole new demotion to your work, quite literally!
3d rendered customisable shapes you can animate and download
high res 3d icons you can easily edit in Figma and are completely customisable in Cinema 4D
3d editable avatars and characters
3D downloadable icon packs
Trendy 3D Icon Designs in High Resolution
There should always be a synergy between the colours you use and what your brand is about. It’s also important to consider your competitors, making sure so you don’t look this same.These resources allow you to define the perfect colour palette, create smooth UI gradients and even run colour combinations through a web accessibility checker.
Multicolour Gradients, Pure CSS Code, JPG Download and Open Source
Browse various gradient backgrounds and directly export the CSS
Generate colours based on lighting and pigment
Color Hunt is a free and open platform for colour inspiration with thousands of trendy hand-picked colour palettes
Create a colour palette around a specific word
Daily curated colour pallets
The super fast colour schemes generator!
Khroma uses AI to learn which colours you like and creates limitless palettes for you to discover, search, and save
This tool is built for designers and developers to test color contrast compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
Want beautiful, realistic video footage in high resolution, but don’t have the time or resources to do it yourself?.These websites are perfect for creating backgrounds, music videos, promo videos, ads and much more.
Awesome Stock Video Clips, Stock Music, Sound Effects & Video Templates
Beautiful Free Stock Video Footage
Good iconography helps provide clarity and structure on a page. Creating icons from scratch can be extremely time consuming, as can finding a complete set to match your brand. We’ve compiled some of our favourites to streamline this process for you.
Thousands of free Icons & Collections
handcrafted icons collections
Phosphor is a flexible icon family for interfaces, diagrams, presentations — whatever, really
The largest collection of vector icons available in 64 formats
A large icon library
Open-source CSS, SVG and Figma UI Icons Available in SVG Sprite, styled-components, NPM & API
Learning how to build and manage an effective design system is essential. It allows for quick bulk changes and scalability, all whist keeping a visually consistent style. The links below will provide a solid explanation of good UX practices, which will keep people coming back to your websites time and time again.
Material is a design system – backed by open-source code – that helps teams build high-quality digital experiences
A collection of the best UX practices
An open source collection of design principles and methods
A frequently updated collection of Design System examples, articles, tools and talks
The best way to sell an idea is to show it. Mock-ups are an incredibly powerful way to help visualise what something is going to look like. These websites help you quickly create high quality mockups you can use on your website or in client pitches.
Create high quality mockups with the online generator
Create Social media mockups
Is there anything more frustrating than waiting for a website to load? Nope, didn't think so. A slow load time will not only increase the bounce rate on your site, but with googles algorithms, it can also effect your google page ranking. Compressing your images can massively reduce the size of your page, with next to no visual loss in the quality of image. This is a huge win all around, and definitely something you should be consistently doing.
Online image compression
Online JPEG compression
If you liked these, or have any suggestions you think should be added to the list, please get in touch via hello@rh-designs.co.uk
Got a new project or business venture in mind? Send us an email today and let's bring your idea to life!
