Illustrations translate texts into visuals, making them easy to understand.
That’s why 85% of buyers prefer brands and websites that use illustrations. But great graphics cost a premium until you find this article.
Read on as I’ll show you 16 places to discover free, high-quality images for your websites and projects.
Most of the platforms allow you to use the images for commercial and personal users without permission, so you don’t have to worry about attributing the designers.
You can begin your searches below.
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1. DotYeti
Launched in 2020, DotYeti offers access to over 150 vivid and free illustrations. Many of those lean towards marketing and branding design efforts. These illustrations can enrich marketing materials with added depth and character.
You can choose from four different styles (Base, Flat, Gradient, and Outline), which are 100% customizable and professional. Currently, the images are available in PNG and AI formats, with more on the way.
Illustrations are divided into six categories – Business & Technology, People & Emotions, Activities & Sports, Travel & Holidays, Objects & Elements, and Education (upcoming).
All it takes is a free sign-up with an email address or attach your Google account to use DotYeti’s platform.
2. FreePik
FreePik holds an extensive collection of premium and free graphic resources for individual and commercial uses.
The illustrations come in different formats such as vectors, icons, JPG, and Photoshop Document (PSD). You can find various graphics to bring your projects to life, prove your points, or deliver a visual experience with your content.
FreePik users can find illustrations by keyword search. In addition, they can filter the results to narrow down the search. The website also has a vast library of stock photos spanning different categories, including mockups, greeting cards, flyers, and logos.
Graphic artists can sign up to sell their arts on the platform.
3. illu.station
illu.station offers high-quality and beautiful illustrations you can use for your landing pages, apps, or presentations.
It holds about 500 Themeisle-designed free illustrations you can download as PNG and SVG.
The website features a color palette that lets you change the illustrations' color before downloading them. You can also download all the 500 illustrations in a swoop, relieving you of the stress of downloading them individually.
The copyright license lets you download, copy, modify, distribute and use the assets for commercial and noncommercial purposes without permission. However, it forbids you from compiling them to create similar or competing services.
4. Flaticon
Flaticon is the home of over seven million vector icons and social media stickers, making it one of the largest icon databases on the internet.
The platform holds free icons for any project, including interface icons and animated icons for creating captivating presentations, websites, landing pages, and apps. You can get them in PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD, or BASE 64 formats.
The website is intuitive and features an on-site search box that makes discovering icons for any project seamless. Additionally, it lets you create multiple collections to organize your icons. You can also resize or edit the icons' color before downloading them.
Designers can contribute to the platform and earn money from their creations.
5. Ira Design
Ira Design by creative Tim lets you build free illustrations to power your projects.
The open-source MIT licensed illustrations library holds 36 characters, 52 objects, 25 backgrounds, and 17 outline characters for your web design or app projects.
You can customize the illustrations to your needs by mixing and matching the five available color gradients. They’re available in SVG or PNG formats.
The images are suitable for commercial and personal uses. Also, they're infinitely scalable, so you don’t have to worry about compromising the image quality when resizing them.
6. Open Peeps
Open Peeps is a hand-drawn illustration library of scenes of people, available free for commercial and personal uses under the CCO license.
It comes with building blocks featuring vector arms, body, legs, and emotions you can mix and match to create different peeps. The blocks let you combine clothing and hairstyles, show emotion with different facial expressions, and create different poses.
The building blocks allow nearly 600,000 possible combinations, so you can rest assured of creating any illustration you want when you use the platform.
Besides building your illustrations, Open Peeps also holds a large collection of ready-to-download peeps you can grab for your project. The images are in PNG and SVG formats.
7. Vecteezy
Vecteezy lets you download high-quality vector art, stock photos, and videos to get your projects done faster.
The collections are free, but joining Pro gives you access to unlimited downloads, a pro license right on all downloads, and the Vecteezy editor. It also lets you use the creative resources for commercial and personal uses without attributions.
Vecteezy boasts of a vast contributors network that regularly adds fresh content to the platform—so you can expect something new, anything you visit.
8. Illustrations
Illustrations hold about 119 illustrations and 149 line objects.
The color is customizable, and you can only download the creatives as SVG documents. The platform requires you to pay whatever you can if you intend to use the illustrations or icons in any commercial projects.
However, downloading them for use in personal projects like personal websites, blogs or applications comes at no cost, but you must attribute the creatives to Illustrations.
9. Vector4Free
Vector4Free is one of the largest free vector databases. It requires users to sign up with an email address or connect their Facebook account to use the platform.
You can find your desired vector art by doing a keyword search or browsing the categories. Some of the popular categories are logos, animals, fantasy, and clip art, among others.
The free license requires attributions, but joining Pro lets you use the vectors for commercial uses without attributing the designers. Pro license holders also enjoy faster downloads and access to all the collections.
10. unDraw
unDraw is an open-source hand-crafted illustration library with beautiful SVG images you can use to power your web and application design projects, products, or presentations.
Launched in 2017, the constantly updated platform offers designers, developers, and content creators fresh and exciting design options each time they visit.
Its open-source license allows anyone to use the illustration for any purpose, including commercial projects, without attribution or costs. In addition, users can customize the colors to match their brand identity and infinitely scale the images without degrading the quality.
11. Absurd Design
Absurd Design is the home of surrealist illustrations.
Each illustration is weird and open to limitless interpretations, allowing everyone to give it their separate meaning. Moreover, the images are not AI detected. Instead, they're a product of human imagination, created by “human freehand on a digital tablet.”
The illustrations are of high quality and on transparent background. You can use them on your landing page, website, and apps. They also have broad applications in projects related to meditation, mental health, business, creativity, education, and others.
Absurd Design has several illustrations you can use for free.
However, you can join the membership plan to support the art creator and make further development possible. Unfortunately, the plan is available to only 300 persons at a time.
12. Pixabay
Pixabay curates over 2.5 million royalty-free stock images, videos, and music.
As a vibrant community of artists, it enables creators to share copyright-free stock on the platform, allowing users to download them for personal and commercial purposes without permission and attribution.
You can also upload your pictures to make them available to other users. Pixabay is easy to use and doesn’t require you to register an account to download images.
However, signing up lets you download unlimited full-resolution media, participate in community voting to decide images that get published, organize images in collections, follow artists, and comment on published media.
13. Humaaans
Humaaans lets you build illustrations by mixing and matching elements.
The drag-and-drop illustration builder is easy to use and features a vast design library that allows you to create human illustrations however you like them.
You can customize their position, hairstyle, colors, and clothes to make the illustrations your own. You also have options to select backgrounds to make a scene or add ambiance to your creation.
If you're at a loss on where to begin, the available templates can get you started, or you can use them to hasten your work. Humaaans illustrations are free for commercial and personal uses under the CCO Public Domain License.
14. VectorStock
VectorStock is a royalty-free vector-only image library. It holds nearly 30 million images with over 10,000 new additions daily, making it suitable for any project.
The marketplace has about 925,000 free vector graphics. The rest are only available to premium account holders. In addition, all the images are infinitely scalable, making them best for high-resolution printing displays.
The platform also holds more than three million royalty-free logos you can customize to your needs.
15. Open Doodles
Open Doodle holds free open-source illustrations you can download without signing up.
Created by Pablo Stanley, the illustration library allows users to copy, edit, remix, share or redraw the images without restrictions. The creatives are available primarily in SVG and PNG formats. However, you can download some as GIFs.
You can use the illustration for commercial and personal purposes without attribution and license.
16. The Noun Project
The Noun Project curates beautiful and authentic images that celebrate diversity and represent a more inclusive world.
The mission-driven photo collection has grown into a 7 million global members community of photographers from over 120 countries.
The project holds over three million icons, one of the most comprehensive collections globally, and an extensive database of quality art pictures. All the graphics are available for free downloads but require attributions. Additionally, the images are not customizable.
However, you can upgrade to any pro plan to enjoy these features and more.
Final Thought
Now you can start building your websites, apps, or landing pages.
Use this resource to find suitable illustrations to captivate your audience. You can create yours or customize the ones you find to meet your requirements. Avoid copyright infringement by using images based on their license terms.
