Attention all graphic design nerds, we have a treat for you today. At Xpand, we know that as a graphic designer you are always on the lookout for inspiration and resources that can keep you at the top of your graphic design game!
So here are 52 carefully curated resources that we think every graphic designer should have in their arsenal.
Brace yourself, your life as a graphic designer will never be the same! Let’s go…
1. Adobe Creative Suite: If you are a graphic designer or thinking of becoming one, this will be your go-to resource.
2. Spotify: Great music for those long design sessions.
3. Dribbble: Discover and connect with the world’s top designers.
4. DeviantArt: The largest online community for art and design inspiration.
5. Designers Talk Forum: A chat forum for graphic designers.
6. Graphic Design Forums: Another great forum to collaborate, connect and chat with other designers.
7. Lorum Ipsum Generator: Great resource if you design wireframes for websites.
8. Icon Finder (Free): 100,000+ free icons you can use for your graphic design projects.
9. UC Creative: A hub of creative insights and design inspiration from a wide variety of sources.
10. InDesign Secrets: The world’s #1 resource for all things InDesign.
11. Pixel Surplus: We all love a good design bundle or two, here you can find loads! The go to resource for creatives.
12. Pixel Buddha: Exclusive free and premium high-quality resources for web designers and developers
13. Premium Pixels: A collection of free design resources created and curated by UK based Web Designer Orman Clark.
14. Creative Booster: Handcrafted professional graphic design freebies like fonts, mockups, templates, and graphics.
15. Original Mockups: Original mockups for all your design needs.
16. Visual Hierarchy: The marketplace with smart resources for busy designers.
17. My Fonts: A digital fonts distributor. Who doesn’t love a good font directory?!
18. Shutterstock: Stock photos, royalty free images, and vectors all in one place. Warning: you could get lost for days on this one.
19. Graphic Burger: Tasty design resources made with care for each pixel. Free for both personal & commercial use. Have a bite!
20. Freebbble: High-quality Dribbble design freebies in one place.
21. Udemy: Keep honing your graphic design skills with fun and creative courses and projects.
22. PlayWell: Slack community for game developers and graphic designers.
23. Designers Unite: Slack community for graphic designers to discuss issues, get inspired and share designs.
24. Everywhere Design: Slack community for people interested in design.
25. Designer Talk: Yet another Slack community for designers to chat about industry news and trends.
26. Freebiesbug: Free PSD’s and other resources for designers.
27. Design Stuff: Another great Slack community for graphic designers.
28. 365 PSD: Get a free downloadable PSD every day.
29. Dbf: Dribbble and Behance design freebies.
30. UI Space: High-quality hand crafted freebies.
31. Coolors: Super fast colour scheme generator for designers.
32. Adaptive Backgrounds: Extract dominant colours from image backgrounds.
33. Brand Colours: The biggest collection of official brand colour codes for design research.
34. Paletton: Design custom colour schemes for your graphic design projects.
35. Moodboard: Build mood boards for your design projects and easily share with one click.
36. Land-Book: Design inspiration and landing page gallery for when you are dealing with those website design projects.
37. Behance: Get some design inspiration from the vast archives of design portfolios plus showcase your own work for the world to see and admire.
38. The Hungry JPEG: Premium graphic design resources.
39. Font Squirrel: 100% free commercial fonts for your design projects.
40. Adobe Color CC: The go-to resource for all things colour related.
41. FontShop: A great font resource for graphic designers.
42. Book Cover Archive: Book cover inspiration for graphic designers creating e-book, reports or book covers.
43. Creative Bloq: Design inspiration to get your creative juices flowing.
44. DaFont: Archive of fonts available for download.
45. GlyphSearch: Search engine for icons and glyphs.
46. Designers.mx: Curated music playlists to get you in the ‘zone’, for designers by designers.
47. The Design Blog: Design inspiration to make you a good designer.
48. Abobe Kuler: Create the perfect colour scheme for your designs.
49. The Dieline: Design inspiration, for all things packaging.
50. It’s Nice That: Championing the most exciting and engaging design work online.
51. Creative Review: From advertising, photography and film, to design, music and fashion. How is creativity changing your world? This site will show you.
52: Logo Design Love: Logo Design Love is a website devoted to logos and visual identities.
UPDATE:
We’ve updated our article to add a nifty tool from Canva to the list. Canva Colours allows you to find colour combinations that will help you to create beautiful designs.
Phew! That’s a long list of resources but we hope you found a few golden nuggets in there that you didn’t already know about.
