If you work in an association, the chances are you’re often on the hunt for good-quality photos for your website, event materials, program promotions, webinar presentations or industry reports.

In the ideal world, it’d be fantastic to use unique photos of your community, for example, event photos or an organised member photoshoot. However, unfortunately, it’s not always possible.

We all know about the big stock photo sites. But of course we also know how much they cost…

So, here’s a handy tool for your association!

We’ve put together a list of our 10 favourite websites full of free stock photos, icons, and other design elements to help you find original quality assets that won’t cost you a cent.

 

10 Websites for Free Stock Photos and Design Elements

 

We’ll start with our favourite free photo stocks collections, followed by free resources to find GIFs, icons, emojis, and word cloud and QR code makers!

1. Pexels. Pexels hosts hundreds of thousands of free stock photos and every day new high resolution photos are added. They provide high quality and completely free stock photos that are nicely tagged, searchable and easy to ‘discover’.

2. Pixabay. Apart from a huge collection of high quality royalty-free images, on Pixabay you can also find free videos and music.

3. Unsplash. Unsplash is another collection of over 2 million free high-resolution images brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers.

4. The danger of stock images is that some of them become very popular and recognisable. If you would like to keep your content unique, check how your chosen image has been used before on TinEye, a ‘reverse image search’.

5. Have you ever wondered how to add a screenshot of your website within a nice photo (like we did on the image above ☝️)? Or maybe you need to create a mock-up of a pen / t-shirt / cup with your branding? Not a problem, visit PlaceIt for a great collection of free drag-and-drop style mock-ups.

6. If you’d like to add a move to your image, search Giphy for the biggest collection of searchable GIFs.

7. If you’re looking for customisable icons, visit IconsDB. On IconsDB you’re not only able to search for an icon by category or keywords, but also create it in any colour you want and download in different sizes and formats

8. For those of you who want to spice up your social media copy with emojis, you can find a huge searchable collection at Emojipedia.

9. If you would like to create a word cloud for your website or blogpost, check out WordClounds, a free online word cloud generator and tag cloud creator. To use the tool, simply paste text, upload a document or open an URL to automatically generate a word- or tag cloud. Customise your cloud with shapes, themes, colours and fonts.

10. Designing a print brochure and would like to create a QR code with a link to your website? Visit QR Code Monkey where you can create beautiful and customisable QR codes for free!

 

What useful sites tools for designers did we miss? What tools do you like the most? We’d love to keep the list growing in the comments!