Illustrations are super important when you are drafting eye-catching blogs, articles, and pieces of educational information. It makes your overall content more pleasing to the eyes and helps in better representation of the words that describe your article.
By using illustrations, you enhance the quality of your content piece and enable the readers some breaks in between the content-heavy and rich quality of words that one uses in their articles.
However, it is not easy to find websites or applications that offer free illustrations without any terms and conditions. Keeping this in mind, we have drafted a list of the 15 best places to find free illustrations that are of high quality and will increase the standard of your work, as well.
Pixabay
Starting with our personal favorite, Pixabay is a royalty-free stock image provider with over 2 million stunning images that one can use in whatever way they like. Its easy-to-use search bar allows you to search specific photos within minutes, download them on your desktop/laptop and use them in your workpieces without worrying about copyright issues.
It offers over 310,000 incredible free illustrations about anything and everything you can think of. From flowers, summer, nature, cats, dogs, music, money, people, to the virus – there is an image for everything on Pixabay. Along with illustrations, it ha free to use music as well that you can use as the background music for your podcasts, YouTube videos, film music, and more. They are primarily instrumental tones with smooth and melodious tunes.
Freepik
Freepik is your graphic resource platform with free vectors, PSD, and stock photos that are absolutely copyright-free and do not cost you any money. It has over 800,000 free illustrations to choose from, from animals to silhouettes to a lot more. It allows you to download files in several formats, including SVG, EPIS, and AI.
All you have to do to get access to these images is to create an account, download the images and save the favorite ones for later. Freepik comes in both free and paid versions. The premium version has a higher number of resources, but honestly, the free one is more than enough to fulfill all your needs.
With this platform, you can find the illustrations that best suit your posters, patterns, banners, and basically anything that needs colorful support in the form of a graphical representation.
Unsplash
Unsplash is also one of the most famous image providers that give you illustrations of high quality for free. Whether you need these images for personal, professional, or commercial use – it doesn’t matter. It is free from copyright for every user. It has a well-established library for vector images with an extensive collection covering topics across domains. This makes it one of the most versatile tools for any designer.
Though Unsplash has more high-definition images than illustrations in total, it has a pool of excellent quality illustrations and icons as well. All the images can be incorporated into new designs to glorify your work completely.
The platform is powered by creators all around the world, and it prestigiously calls itself the ‘internet’s source of freely usable images. From wallpapers to images for blogs, from illustrations to icons, from nature to architecture – Unsplash has it all.
VectorStock
VectorStock is another free illustrator provider with over 200,000 such images. All the photos can either be sorted according to the latest uploads by the ones that are very much in trend. These images are downloadable in formats including PDF, JPG, EPS, and AI.
However, the one thing that differentiates VectorStock from other free illustrations provider is that they only offer illustrations for free for personal use only. This acts as a limitation to freelance designers and even agency designers.
Attribution needs to be provided if you wish to use the free vector image that you take from their website. Another thing that makes your experience better with VectorStock is that whenever you look at any image in the platform, you can always click on ‘view similar’ to get similar photos that are more unique and might fit your work better.
unDraw
unDraw has a collection of SVG images that are constantly updated in real-time find the images that fit your requirements the best and then download them within minutes. It is an open-source illustration provider for any particular idea that you may have in mind and want to convert into a graphical representation.
The images you get from this platform are scalable without any quality degradation and are future-ready and retina-free. You can combine several SVG images without worrying about the speed and embed requests with super fats loading tines. It has millions of illustrations that you can choose from, from nature to food, animals to humans, and finance to art.
You name it; they have it! These illustrations are free to use in any project for commercial or personal use without any involved costs, license, or copyright issues.
Drawkit
Drawkit has tremendously beautiful vector illustrations that are updated weekly. These illustrations are hand-drawn, include icon resources, and are perfect for any kind of project. It is trusted by global companies, including but not restricted to Amazon, Google, Invision, Typeform, and more.
They have both free and paid packs for the illustrations. The free package includes everyday life illustrations, fashion and music illustrations, health and wellness illustrations, family, economy, finance, holiday season-related illustrations, restaurant, dining, election, people working based illustrations, medical and health illustrations, and a lot more. Only a few packs out of the many cost something, and they give you access to illustrations such as eCommerce illustration kit, women and mother’s illustrations, startups and tech illustrations, and more.
You can also choose an illustration amongst the trending illustrations for an easy selection of images. Apart from illustrations, the platform also provides icons that help you enhance the equality of your overall presentation even more.
The noun project
The noun project is your one-stop destination for illustrations, icons, and photos related to anything and everything. It is an incredible repository of over one million images that are customizable as well as downloadable. The stunning icons by the noun project can be easily slipped into Google Suite, letting you create stunning presentations in the office without any hassle. The application focuses on building a global visual language that unites everybody together through the power of illustrations and graphical representations.
There is also a noun project API that is available for all the techies out there to explore and work on the crazy creative ideations. From pride to plants, pets to technology – it has available stock photos and illustrations for all possible topics. Since the images are available for a free download, you can also purchase a royalty-free license to use it for any purpose in the entire world and support the artists as well. Draft and drop icons help you access different images and integrations seamlessly.
Pixaden
Pixaden was designed by people who themselves needed a one-stop destination to fulfill their modern designing needs. Hence, the premium design and web resources are the perfect places to get the right set of images, vectors, and illustrations for your personal, commercial, or professional work. There is a free version that you can utilize to the best of your capabilities. However, there is also a premium version that costs a minimal amount from each of its users per month and gives them all the desired features for a solid designing process.
The vector illustration art gallery is the best place to get any design with any style to fit any choice of work that you may have. All their illustrations are of high quality, professional-looking, and beautifully colored. Apart from illustrations, it also provides a variety of graphics to suit your background image, mockups, text effects, textures, and a lot more that are present to enhance the work quality as a whole. These illustrations are also available for printing logos, business cards, resumes, flyers, brochures, and much more.
Okay, we do agree that Reddit is not the conventional platform that you can use to download illustrations. However, if you use it the right way, it can turn into one. In the search option on Reddit, you can actually search for people posting their graphics and illustrations that one can use for free. If it is not mentioned in their post, it is advised to politely ask them first. This way, you also make a brand-new community of people with whom you can now network. This can also lead to you joining several vector groups on Reddit that may have more such pictures pouring in regularly.
One advantage of utilizing Reddit as an illustration platform is that you will easily get your hands on the unique designs that are not available elsewhere on the internet. When you use the traditional illustration platforms, you see a design that everybody sees. However, if you try to act a little different from the crowd and search for the illustrations that truly fit well with your requirements.
Stockio
Stockio is used for free photos, icons, illustrations, and all other vectors. These files are available for personal and commercial use, royalty-free. The photos are available in different categories, including but not restricted to nature, abstract, people, food, and a lot more. There is no attribution that has to be there in order to use these images, anytime, anywhere, any place. The platform keeps track of all your downloadable files and items that are on your favorite list.
You can also get creative with a number of vector files in different formats to fit your projects. All icons and illustrations can be saved in SVG and PNG formats for the highest flexibility for usage. It is a handy tool for designers covering every single need that a beginner or expert designer may have. Stunning professional photos, editable vectors and illustrations, high-quality icons that stand out, and even unique videos that will absolutely increase the quality of your work to another level.
Humaaans
Humaaans is a mix and match illustration of people and objects with a robust design library that holds uncountable free illustrations. You can easily customize their clothing, colors, positions, and hairstyle to create scenes that fit your project the most. This is the specialty about this particular platform that it lets you customize your own characters, making them unique and distinct! You can also add backgrounds to your project to enhance it further. Most illustrations available on the platform are that of humans, as the name suggests.
It helps you add life to your empty states and vision to the bland statements. You can add some ambiance to your content by adding illustrations provided by Humaaans and use them on onboarding grids, success states, empty states, and more. It is also widely used for error states. All the illustrations are free for personal and commercial use, with a COO public domain license. Hence, you do not have to give any credit or license to anybody while using the images. Absolutely free!
Icons8
Icons8 is your perfect platform for illustrations, icons, photos, music, and many more design tools. It is a savior for people who are not the best when it comes to drawing, as it substitutes for the same it accentuates your boring content from articles, landing pages, emails to app screens. The illustrations are entirely free to use and give your designs a clean, complete, and trendy look.
It offers several types of illustrations from people illustrations, web elements, business illustrations a lot more. The unique thing about Icons8 is that they do not only offer free icon packs and illustrations but strive to build a platform that focuses on solid designing and makes people change how they design things.
It would be right to say; their primary focus is only the design and how to make it a better experience for their users. They have other features like face generator, iOS glyph, and more to make the process even more seamless. Their free collection of illustrations named Ouch! is one of the most famous packs around the internet to get hold of quality illustrations without having to pay anything.
Iconscout
Iconscout offers over 3 million design assets that include vectors, illustrations, icons, and a lot more that help in your designing process. You can search from millions of illustrations and icons according to your requirement and get graphics that suit best with your design needs. The platform has several plugins, integrations, tools, and editors that make the process a more efficient one. All the images are license-free, so you can use them anywhere at any time without worrying about the copyrights.
Renowned brands, including but not restricted to Amazon, Netflix, Disney, Unilever, Sony, and a lot more trust Iconscout with their designs. With such names depending on the platform, there is hardly any scope of error. It lets you add life to your designs within 30 seconds and take it a level higher, quality and graphical-wise. Their SVG and lotion editors let you tweak the colors and backgrounds of the illustrations and icons that you choose and implement them across platforms.
With integrations with Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch, GSuite, MS Office, and more, the plugins help you find assets without leaving any tool and saving a lot more time than usual. It is available both as a free and a paid version. Of course, the paid version has more features and available images compared to the free version.
Absurd
Absurd is the place that offers you some out-of-the-box creations. True to its name, it gives you illustration designs that you will not find anywhere else. Their illustrations are available in two combinations, either a completely black and white form or the colored form – you choose, they make! They make imperfect illustrations that are more relatable to humans instead of focusing on unreal-perfect designs that make no real sense.
Absurd’s illustrations are available in different packs named after chapters, and you can find uniquely weird designs for your presentation to add some sort of kick to the entire design. Each of their illustrations strives to offer limitless interpretations and uses to allow everyone to use it and give the illustration its own meaning.
It encourages each one’s creativity and free spirit. You are free to download and use these illustrations for personal and commercial projects, as they are license-free and do not involve any copyright. Except for the free plan, they also offer a paid plan where they offer regular artwork to their clients around different topics.
Glaze
Glaze has free illustrations to fit every single design need of yours. Their royalty-free illustration library offers images from people, business, commerce, teamwork, places, technology, travel, and a lot more that fit just right with your brand, presentation, and even products. It makes your branding a memorable one, as you get hold of unique illustrations that make the user experience more effective.
However, this platform does require attribution while you use the images. It comes with a free plan and a paid plan, whichever suits your requirement the best. The free plan, however, has quite a few things you need in the beginning. What it does not offer are source files, multiple colorways, and full-size images. All illustrations are curated by expert moderators who know what they are doing and are the best when it comes to changing visual styles, strong aesthetic value, and high-quality craftsmanship.
By now we know the best places from where we can get quality illustrations to enhance our presentations, designs, blogs, pitches and a lot more. All these places offer royalty-free and costless illustrations which can be used for personal, commercial or both purposes. Some of the platforms demand an attribution, but most do not.
Hence, using quirky and high-end illustrations without paying a dime is super easy now, with these platforms striving to serve us better every single day!
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