Online Resources to Help You Learn Graphic Designing Easily

For every graphic designer, whether very experienced or have just learned the basics, you would need to refer to resource sites to grow as an artist. What does that mean? When you need to achieve certain effects or other things on your designs that can not be done on the current tool that you are using, you may need to explore other tools to be able to move forward with your design. To know whether you are doing well in your projects, it would be highly recommended that you get feedback and suggestions from others, most especially experts, to help you out with your projects.

On this site, we have listed down some of the most useful online resources for every user to learn graphic designing in the most uncomplicated way possible. For easy scrolling, we have divided the list into various sections, from general designs, photos, fonts, and the online community sites. If you wish to take your graphic designing knowledge further, then scroll down and check out the list.

For another list relating to graphic designing, check out this list of the graphic design software programs that every artist should have an idea about.

General Design

Behance*

B?hance is a network of different websites where designers and artists visit to either ask for feedback and suggestions from experts, or actually collaborate with others. Here, various people from all over the world converse and talk about graphic or web designing, or anything related to those.

B?hance can also be considered as a platform on the Internet used for the showcasing and discovering of exceptional talent, as well as artistic designs. It is on this website that portfolios from artists are being gathered to serve as the inspiration for others.

Design is Kinky

Design is Kinky is an Australian website that has been in existence since 1998. This website focuses on providing news about designs in general, as well as beautiful and creative works of art done by highly talented graphic artists.

You can find a lot of articles that talk about the arts, paintings, photography, portraits, and even architecture on this site that you can hardy find anywhere else. Always be updated with regards to art and designs by visiting this website.

Bittbox

Bittbox is a website that graphic artists, both beginners and experts, should visit to be updated with the latest trends in the world of graphic designing, for gathering ideas regarding designs, to learn how to design, and to download new tools.

Amateur graphic artists commonly refer to these website for tutorials and how-to videos which makes this a convenient go-to resource site for learning how to do stuff. Aside from the tutorials on this site, there are also other highly informative topics on this site that many designers would find useful.

As mentioned earlier, there are also news articles on this site that provide readers with what is trending with regards to designing in general.

Graphics

Pixeden*

Pixeden is a website where graphic artists may be able to download tons of free graphics and obtain web resources. This website creates graphics and designs for free, but to those who want to enjoy a little more from what this site is offering, you may also sign up to their premium plans as well.

If ever you decide to avail of their premium plans, you will only be paying as low as $6.00 every month, in which you will also be receiving exclusive freebies.

FreePik*

FreePik is a site founded in 2010 that offers users with millions of high quality vectors designs, illustrations, and graphic resources for free. The designs that they are offering are screened by their very own team in order to provide users with only the best graphic designs.

So if you need to download free vector designs, visit this site for awesome content that you can use for both personal and business graphic designs projects.

Creative Market*

If you are looking for more than just graphics illustrations and vectors, check out Creative Market. This website has a lot of things to offer that may be useful for graphic designers. On their site, they also have fonts, textures, and even Photoshop packs.

If you are a graphic designer, you won’t need to go to different websites for the stuff that you need for your projects. Almost everything you need can be found in one website, and that is here on Creative Market.

Pixel Buddha*

Pixel Buddha is another website that every graphic designer should definitely check out. This website has got an endless gallery of freebies that include templates, vector illustrations, icons, and fonts, and you can download all of these absolutely free of charge.

All these content are conveniently available both for personal and commercial use. The website is updated week after week, so if you check on the website regularly, you will be getting brand new content every time, and you might also be lucky enough to receive limited special offers, also for free.

Dribbble

Dribbble has been known by a lot of graphic designers as a very good source of design inspiration and ideas, but little do they know that this website houses lots of free, high quality graphics as well.

The graphics they have range from vector illustrations, textures, patterns, icon designs, and fonts which, as mentioned earlier, can be downloaded for free.

But again, this website is also a place where a community of web designers, graphic designers, logo designers, icon artists, illustrators, typographers, and other classifications of designers come together to show their works of art to others.

Fonts

Font Squirrel*

Don’t let the word “squirrel” from Font Squirrel fool you. While squirrels may be cute, furry, and harmless, but this website is considered by many graphic artists as the king of typography fonts.

Font Squirrel offers hundreds of fonts, ranging from formal typefaces to handwritten-inspired ones that you can download for free. So whatever style you’re looking for, this website will likely have it and you can freely use it for all your commercial projects.

Typecast*

While you may need to have your own account to use the contents on Typeface, but signing up is free of charge and once you sign up, you can already have access to over 3,650 fonts for the web.

Another awesome feature on Typeface is the ability to let users, like you, to design their own prototype typefaces in which you you can export to either HTML or CSS sites. And if you want to apply some stylish effects, you may check out our collection of Photoshop text effects.

Medialoot*

Medialoot is the ideal place to find the perfect graphics for web users, and they also have loads of fonts, both free and premium, available for download.

This site contains a collection of design resources to help graphic artists make their themes, apps, and other designs appear like they were professionally done.

Medialoot also claims to be the solution to design problems by being the “ultimate design toolbox” wherein most, if not all, of the best resources can be found.

DaFont*

Dafont is a website that contains thousands of free fonts in almost every category. There are over 32,000 fonts uploaded on the website, probably even more since a lot of users upload their own fonts to the site every now and then.

All fonts on the site are designed by graphic designers and before it gets added to the list of usable fonts on the site, it still has to undergo a review from the team behind the website.

To narrow down easily when searching for the desired font, the website has a category feature, or as they call it, themes.Within each theme, you can filter by name, popularity, or date added.

Aside from those mentioned, you can also filter the theme according to licensing options which is an awesome feature if you’re looking for a typeface that’s free to be used commercially.

Stock Photographs/Images

Pexels*

For a website that has been described as having “tons of free stock photographs in one place,” you can already determine that Pexels is a must-see website for graphic designers, especially those who have just started doing designs and have not heard of this site before.

For every single day, Pexels uploads five new high quality photos that are copyright-free and can be downloaded for commercial use. Be sure to bookmark this site on your web browser.

Pixabay*

It may already be a cliche to say that this website holds millions of stock images for graphic designers and the average users, but Pixabay does actually have over 1,040,000 stock photos, vectors, and art illustrations available on their website.

On this website, you can search for and even share their images, which are free of copyrights since they are released under the Pixabay license, and allows you to duplicate, alter, and use their images for commercial purposes.

FancyCrave*

FancyCrave is a website that offers high-resolution downloadable photos that graphic designers can use for personal and commercial projects, which makes it the perfect source for both designers and developers.

The photos on this site are emotionally-driven, which means you won’t find any cheesy or dull stock photos here. They can all be downloaded for free and without any copyright restrictions, though they will ask you to provide attribution after downloading.

Unsplash*

Unsplash’s home page quote says the site is “gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers.” And while Unsplash may be little, but it is also a very good resource for graphic designers.

This website currently has over 200,000 free high-resolution photos and adds ten new photos every ten days, which range from portraits and landscapes, to architectural imagery.

With the huge gallery of photos on this site, it is very likely that they have got the photo that you are looking for, chances are, they may even have the photo that you never knew you needed.

Another wonderful feature on Unsplash is its super active community, which currently has 41,872 members and still growing. So aside from just downloading stock photos, you can start following your favorite photographers as well.

Image Converting/Formatting Tools

Pixlr Editor*

Pixlr Editor is one of the two online photo manipulating tools being offered by Pixlr, with the other one being Pixlr Express, which simply allows users to rotate, crop, resize, and add filters on a photo. Pixlr Editor, on the other hand, offers far more advanced tools which closely resembles Adobe Photoshop’s interface.

Between the two tools being offered by Pixlr, Editor gives users more freedom to do whatever they need on the images, such as cloning, applying mask layers, and thorough color corrections.

Canva

Canva is a free-to-use designing tool website which was founded in 2012 with the slogan, “Amazingly simple graphic design software”. Its easy-to-use features include a drag-and-drop interface and provides users with access to over a million stock photographs, graphics designs, illustrations, icons, and fonts.

Canva is being used by by both professional and highly skilled designers as well as those average users who simply want to do certain projects for either personal or commercial purposes. You can design presentations, graphics for social media pages, and many more with the layouts that you can download from the website.

Videos

Video Copilot

Video Copilot is ideal for those who require online tutorial on how to make special effects for videos. The website also contains plug-ins like Optical Flares and Element 3D which are among the standard tools being used by large FX studios.

The website has published over 150 tutorial videos along with dozens of downloadable digital products and plug-ins that can be used by professional designers all over the world.

Fubiz*

This website should be included among your bookmarked websites since it is an excellent place where creative and inspirational pieces of design are posted daily.

You can search about photography, pop culture, technology, and graphic designs here on Fubiz, but probably the best one you can find on this site are inspirational pieces for videos and video making. Check out this other list for some more sources for web inspiration.

Design Education

Tuts+*

Tutsplus, or often stylized as Tuts+, is a highly respected online resource website under Envato that offers online courses and tutorials on developing websites, web design, graphic design and illustration, photography, videography, music-making, and many other digital courses.

While they may have free courses that you can enroll yourself in and watch over and over again, they also have premium courses to take your learning a bit further and make your knowledge broader in terms of designing.

Skillshare

Skillshare is an online community where both practitioners and learners come together. When you come to this site, you may either be the learner and ask for lessons from expert practitioners, or you could also be the teacher and provide informative tutorials to beginners.

When you sign in to their plans, you will be given unlimited to over 17,000 classes that range from designs, to photography and film, to crafts, and even technology. You can even take classes offline by downloading the app on your mobile devices.

Community

Deviant Art

This one is probably a no-brainer, even for the average user, since a lot of images and illustrations can be found posted on DeviantArt. This can also be treated as a social media site for many images ranging from stock photographs to graphic illustrations.

While being considered as the largest online art gallery and community for professional artists and art enthusiasts, the people in the community are highly active and actually offer feedback. Through DeviantArt, people are able to connect through the making and sharing of works of art.

Flickr*

Flickr might be recognized by many as a social media site of photography, but this resource site is an awesome place to look for design groups since a large number of people are present on the site with new photographs to share or to discover everyday.

The website aims to help people make their photographs available to every user in the most convenient way possible. You may be able to share your photos and designs on the site as well, and gather inspiration from other within your community.