As I’m building up this site, I’m hyper conscious of the fact it’s costing more to build and maintain than I’m able to earn from it. I’d love to have a web developer and designer on retainer who I work closely with to realize my vision. But, it’s not realistic right now for me to spend the time or money to make full brand guidelines and custom graphics.

Enter free and nearly free design resources to the rescue.

Here are some of my favorites:

Canva – Designing for dummies without Adobe (basically). It’s online. Nothing to install. It has a free version. And has tons of ready made templates for free and many more for nominal costs. It’s super non-designer friendly with great UX/UI. Select “create a design” and then use the intuitive buttons to do the basic manipulations you need to layout to create something great. My “save the date” image for an earlier post was made in Canva.

Creative Market – Ready to use design assets. So many assets. You can spend days drooling over design bundles. Some are free. Many more are cheap. Fonts, logos, vector graphics, powerpoint templates, and much much more. The big bundle packs are the best deals. This site is a great resource for designs a non-designer can quickly manipulate to put to use. It’s also great for inspiration.

Font Spring – Fonts. Who doesn’t love fonts? Some are on sale as low as free! Their licensing language won’t leave you scratching your head. 

Pixabay – Online content needs images. Pixabay’s got images, and vector graphics, illustrations, and even videos. The selection is uneven in quality and visual appeal, but there’s plenty good in there.

Pexels – Like Pixabay, it’s another great source of free stock photos. The pictures definitely tend towards a very instagram filter feel. So if that’s not your aesthetic, you may struggle to find images you like. This post’s feature image is from Pexels. 

Noun Project – Icons! An icon for everything. They’ve got over 1 million royalty free icons.

Enjoy!