Assets roundup
Where to find free images, icons, and assets you can actually use
The free asset sources worth bookmarking for photos, illustrations, and icons, plus the licensing basics that keep you out of trouble when you use them in client work.
Good free assets can lift a design in minutes. Bad licensing can cost a client real money. This is a short list of dependable sources, organized by what you need, with the licensing rules that matter written in plain language so you do not have to guess.
First, the rule that covers all of it: free to download is not the same as free to use however you like. Always check the specific license on the specific asset, especially for anything commercial, and keep a note of where each asset came from.
Photography
- Unsplash. High quality photos with a permissive license that covers most commercial use without attribution. The catch is popularity: the most downloaded shots turn up everywhere, so dig past the front page if you want something that does not feel generic.
- Pexels. Similar model to Unsplash, with a strong library of both photos and short video clips. A good second well to draw from when the obvious pick is overused.
- Pixabay. A broad mix of photos, vectors, and illustrations under a permissive license. Quality is more uneven, so it rewards a careful eye, but the range is enormous.
Illustrations
- unDraw. Clean, open illustrations you can recolor to match your brand before you export them. Because you can set the accent color, they blend into a project far better than fixed art.
- Humaaans. Mix and match illustrations of people that you can pose and recolor. Useful when stock photos of people would feel too corporate.
Icons
- Lucide. A large, consistent open source icon set that is a community continuation of a well loved original. Clean, neutral, and easy to drop into any interface.
- Heroicons. A tidy set from the team behind a popular CSS framework, in outline and solid styles. Small, but the quality is high and the two styles cover most needs.
- Phosphor. A flexible icon family with multiple weights, so you can match the icon weight to your type. Great when you want the icons to feel tuned rather than borrowed.
Type
- Google Fonts. The obvious one, and still the best single source of free, commercially usable fonts, with well over a thousand families and a filter to find them. Host the files yourself for speed and privacy rather than loading them from a third party.
Check whether attribution is required, whether commercial use is allowed, and whether there are limits on redistribution or resale. Public domain and permissive licenses are the safest. When a license is unclear, do not use the asset in paid work. And never assume an image found through a search engine is free, because most are not.
Make free assets feel like yours
The tell of an amateur project is assets that look borrowed. Recolor illustrations to your palette. Crop photos tightly and apply a consistent treatment so a mixed set feels like one shoot. Pick a single icon family and use only that family, so the icons look drawn by the same hand. A little consistency turns a pile of free parts into something that looks designed on purpose.