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Illustrations have long been one of the most popular design trends. They vary in their look — from flat and geometric to hand-drawn and cartoonish. We see them in hero images, onboarding screens, page states, branding, marketing, and many other places. A well-designed and contextual illustration creates strong visual associations. They help users understand the intended message and find what they’re looking for. The right illustration style can also make your brand memorable and help your product stand out.
You can always create illustrations from scratch, but it takes time, skill, and resources. Another way to go about it is to use free illustration resources and tweak them to your needs. Not sure where to find them? That's what our curated list of 11 super helpful free illustration resources is here for!
- Storyset
- Interfacer
- Designs.AI
- Humaaans
- Open Peeps
- DrawKit
- Stubborn
- Usemash
- illlustrations
- Lukaszadam
- Free Illustrations
Illustrations have long been one of the most popular design trends. They vary in their look — from flat and geometric to hand-drawn and cartoonish. We see them in hero images, onboarding screens, page states, branding, marketing, and many other places. A well-designed and contextual illustration creates strong visual associations. They help users understand the intended message and find what they’re looking for. The right illustration style can also make your brand memorable and help your product stand out.
You can always create illustrations from scratch, but it takes time, skill, and resources. Another way to go about it is to use free illustration resources and tweak them to your needs. Not sure where to find them? That's what our curated list of 11 super helpful free illustration resources is here for!
Storyset
Storyset is a fascinating illustration constructor that caters to any taste. These illustrations will make any landing page, app, or presentation look polished and refined.
How does it work?
- Choose a subject or a theme for your illustration
- Pick a style: clean and flat, casual retro, hand-written, fresh and energetic, or one with strange proportions
- Select the primary color and adjust the number of details
- Download the final image in SVG or PNG format for free
The tool allows the option to animate the image and export it in HTML, GIF, or MP4, which is the icing on the cake. If these formats sound alien to you, explore our Images lesson to learn what they each stand for and where to use them.
Interfacer
Interfacer has a large collection of design goodies: fonts, icons, mockups, UI kits, and, most certainly, illustrations. This website provides the works of talented designers from over the world. All content is free for commercial use.
All you have to do is to click a button, and the illustration is yours. Unfortunately, the website’s UX resembles that of a flea market — there are no filtering or sorting options, and to find the right image, you need to scroll through many pages. But the gems you can find there are definitely worth it.
Designs.AI
Designs.AI may seem like a run-of-the-mill compilation of illustrations, but you can be sure that you'll find something in the style you want, including:
- Classic sets of human characters
- Flat geometric illustrations (great for infographics or business presentations)
- Beautiful circular landscapes and cityscapes
- Cartoonish images (they can create a friendly mood, put users at ease, and smooth over the frustration errors or empty pages can cause)
Humaaans
The Humaaans library is all about humans! If you're looking for illustrations of people designed in the same flat casual no-face style, this is a perfect resource for you. This library is essentially a constructor. You can rotate and position the characters or change their clothes and hairstyle. When choosing the style of illustrations, make sure it fits your product's personality. This will make your product more engaging and attractive.
Humaaans is a venture by designer and creator Pablo Stanley, who’s also behind the Open Peeps free library — a similar resource with more detailed cartoonish hand-drawn characters.
Open Peeps
Open Peeps is a library of hand-drawn characters created by designer Pablo Stanley. Remember playing with building blocks when you were a kid? This image library allows you to do the same and play with building blocks of vector arms, legs, and facial expressions.
This constructor allows your imagination to run wild quite a bit by letting you combine clothes, choose matching hairstyles, change skin color, choose poses, and more. Open Peeps is also striving to be inclusive — it already has illustrations of people with disabilities. The next update promises to add more body types, senior characters, pets, and service animals! To learn more about inclusive design, explore our Design Accessibility course.
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DrawKit
DrawKit provides great crafted illustrations and icon packs. Topics change from general themes like music, love, family, health, and wellness to social topics like Black Lives Matter and elections. The image style varies from topic to topic. You can request an illustration you'd like created next or upvote the ones you like. To stay up-to-date with new illustrations, you can sign up for their weekly newsletter.
Pro tip: To create the illusion of speed and movement, use characters that are moving, jumping, running, flying, swimming, or cycling.
Stubborn
Stubborn is a constructor that allows you to create ideal human characters from off-the-shelf elements and styles. The library creators decided to spice things up and added a collection of robots too.
The free version of the library includes illustrations of indoor and outdoor scenes. You can use them to create full-fledged compositions for your website, mobile app, email template, or presentation. Stubborn is compatible with Sketch, Figma, and Adobe Illustrator.
Usemash
Usemash is more than a library of fancy illustrations — it's a versatile constructor! It provides you with the possibility to create your own scenes. And it's very easy — just use the templates of predefined characters and objects.
The free version of Usemash contains 250 vector illustrations. You can change them to your needs in Sketch or Figma and use them without the risk of violating any copyright restrictions. Pro access offers 500 vector images with regular annual updates and 24/7 support.
illlustrations
Illlustrations is an open resource designed by Vijay Verma — a generous designer who loves sharing illustrations for free for both commercial and personal use. He doesn't just settle for one topic either. The designer draws highly detailed images of everyday things and animals — dogs, water bottles, or hamburgers, for example. Sometimes, Vijay also creates thematic collections, like Christmas, gadgets, working, or gym. The library is small, but it's free, and the download process is quite straightforward.
Lukaszadam
Lukasz Adam is an independent web designer, illustrator, and web developer. Knowing first-hand how hard it is to find free resources online, Lukasz decided to offer his illustrations for free. His Lukaszadam library has illustrations of people and everyday objects. The style ranges from casual with a retro touch to flat and clean. On the website, you'll find well-crafted icon sets that you can use for whatever you want — they're free forever. You can also send Lukasz your illustration ideas, and you might see them put into action the next time you visit the website.
Free Illustrations
The name of this website speaks for itself. Free Illustrations is a huge image library, with items available for download in multiple formats — AI, EPS, SVG, PNG, and PSD, not to mention Figma and Sketch. The downloading process isn't very straightforward. First, you must visit the original site to download the image. Then, choose the format you need and select the download location. However, the exquisite illustrations are worth this roundabout process.
If illustrations aren’t cutting it for your design, consider using stock images. Our blog post on the 10 Best Free Stock Image Websites shares a helpful list of resources you can use.
