17 Resources to Help You Design Better, Faster, and Make More Money As A Graphic Designer
You need an arsenal of resources to help you create better design projects, save time while designing, and make more money by offering your services in the long run as a graphic designer.
In this article, you will discover 17 resources that will help you design better, faster, and make more money as a graphic designer.
Without further ado, let’s jump into it.
Dribbble is a website where millions of designers from around the world showcase their design portfolios. You can hop on to the site to get design inspirations from other graphic designers’ works for creating top-notch designs.
Aside from getting design inspiration on this site, you can also get hired for freelance design roles by building your design portfolio on the platform.
Behance is another popular design portfolio creation website for designers around the world.
Just like Dribbble, you can get design inspiration from other creatives’ works, and it’s also possible that you get hired by brands or companies once you’ve got a portfolio with great works on the site.
Beyond being just a social media network, Pinterest is a visual search engine where creatives, entrepreneurs, business owners, and anyone, in general, come to get ideas for starting a project.
Several graphic designers publish their work on Pinterest, and you can get ideas here for your next creative projects. You can even build a design portfolio on Pinterest to reach more audiences for extra gig opportunities.
This is a marketplace for buying and selling creative digital products such as clip art, fonts, mockups, templates, etc.
As a graphic designer, you can sign up as a seller on Creative Market to sell your creative works to the millions of people that visit the site monthly.
You can also purchase design resources such as clip art, fonts, templates, etc., on the site for faster design creations as opposed to creating these elements from scratch.
Creative Fabrica is another digital art marketplace where graphic designers and general art lovers can buy and sell clip art, mockups, fonts, templates, etc.
Colours are one of the essential elements of design, and the ability to effectively combine colours in design creations can’t be overestimated.
Coolors.co is a colour palette website where you can get colour palette combinations ideas for creating captivating designs for your clients or agency. Colour codes for unpopular colours can also be retrieved on the site for use on your design application or software.
Colorhunt is another colour palette combination/inspiration website for designers and artists to get matching colours for better design creations.
Just like Coolors.co, you can also retrieve colour codes on the site for use on your design software.
Fontsquirrel is an open-source website for free and commercially licensed font downloads. There are over 1000 free fonts available for download on the site.
The site also has a font identifier feature that helps users get to know and download fonts found across the web without knowledge of the font name. All that is required to use this feature is to upload a picture of the font to the website and then watch the system do the magic.
Another great source for font downloads is Dafont. There are loads of fonts to be downloaded on the site, and users can also submit fonts to be added to the font database on Dafont.
10. No-background HQ Stock Images Bundle
Sometimes, stock images are needed for creating design work. To save time searching for the right stock images, cropping, and removing backgrounds from the stock images, the no-background HQ stock image bundle comes into play.
The bundle contains over 1000 HQ (High-Quality) no-background images that cut across several niches. You can easily plug and play the images into your designs in no time without having to worry about cropping and removing the background from the images.
The best part is that the bundle is updated with more no-background images for your design needs. You can check out the bundle here.
Placeit.net is one of the subsidiary websites of the Envato marketplace. The site can be regarded as one of the biggest mockup download websites online.
There are varieties of mockups available on the website, this spans across T-shirt mockups, mugs, billboards, bags, hats, etc. The mockups are also available for download in image and video formats.
Aside from mockups, you can also get editable logos, create videos, and design templates on Placeit.net.
This is another popular website for getting beautiful mockups for your designs. You can get books, bags, print media, T-shirts, billboards, and other mockups on the site.
There are also both free and premium (paid) mockups available on the site.
Ublast.com is a great website for getting some uncommon mockups, such as van mockups, social media mockups, cosmetic jar mockups, etc. There are also fonts, templates, graphics, and colours available for download on the site.
On Psdmockups, you can get beautiful mockups in PSD format (Photoshop). There are over 100 free mockups available for Photoshop users on this site.
Mockups such as envelope mockups, truck mockups, glass wine bottle mockups, signage mockups, etc. can be found on Psdmockups.
Timedoctor is a tool that will help you keep track of the number of hours spent working on design projects. This tool is useful for you if you prefer hourly rate payments for your graphic design services.
You can use Timedoctor to bill your clients or employer as a remote graphic designer.
This is an app and browser extension that helps you browse and save curated inspiration from designers all around the world in real time.
You can gran images (design inspirations) from any website and have them curated in one place with the help of savee.it
Freepik is a large design resource website for downloading illustrations, clip art, icons, mockups, etc. There are free and premium resources available on the site to help you create captivating graphics.
You can also sign up as a contributor on Freepik to make money when your uploaded creative works (illustrations, mockups, clip art, etc.) are downloaded by premium members of Freepik.
There you have it, 17 resources to help you design faster, better, and make more money as a graphic designer. Ensure to start utilizing the resource(s) you just got to know about in this article
This is my #76/365 article in 2022, I’m on a challenge to put up 365 articles here this year.
