60 Best Design Resources of 2021

Are you a design nerd? Or a developer learning a bit of designing in between? Well, for your learning, practice, and even to make projects you will need some tools and resources to kick off your side-hustle in design.

Here, we present your 60 best design-only resources you need to start being creative. You will find something unique, from new illustration websites to color-based tools you need to try.

Best Animated GIFs

GIPHY: Probably one of the most popular websites to find, create, and serving over 1 billion GIFs a day!
Tenor: One of the biggest competitors of GIPHY with a less crowded interface. Simple but with a tonne of content.
Reaction GIFs: A little different as it has “I am feeling” and “My answer is” search options to return reaction-based results.
Imgflip: A perfect combination of GIFs that double up as memes! You can make both memes and GIFs to post on their platform.
Reddit: Need user-moderated, user's favorite GIFs? There are some subreddits that you will find nowhere else!
Gfycat: They have multiple categories on varied search terms along with a separate developer portal for API and SDK access.
gifgifgifgifgif: Not kidding! This is one of the funniest ones out there. And yes, they use strange UI with Comic Sans...
GIFBin: Another one with a weird look. On their homepage, you'll get one random GIF along with the ability to comment.
Imgur: People are posting anything here from normal images to memes to photos to...of course GIFs!
PandGif: +1 to panda for including stickers along with a vast variety of GIFs.

Best Illustration Resources

Icons8: Not only they're one of the best icon creators but they have a separate section for vectors in their navigation. Check out the popular Ouch! set of illustrations.
Shapefest: They came in recently with a bang. Come here for a massive set of 3D shapes, hands, circles, and more.
ls.graphics: One of the most active platforms where you get both paid and free set of illustrations, mockups, and everything for your design needs.
Shape 2: A little shy of 30,000, they have illustrations to use with SVGs, Lottie, and even for your React apps!
Sapiens by UI8: Need humans to customize? UI8, the extensive marketplace for all things design has this neat tool.
Limitless Designs: This is a free collection of avatars that you can use for both commercial or personal projects.
Isometric Love: All your search for "cute isometric illustration" ends right here. You can even customize them accordingly.
Free Illustrations: They are all free but also have 130+ premium customizable options too.
pixeltrue: Free SVG illustrations and Lottie animations under MIT License.
Big Heads: Combine different expressions, clothes, hairstyles, and more to make a random head illustration all with your wild imagination!

Best Icon Resources

Tabler Icons: 800+ free SVG icons for you to customize colors, stroke, and size.
Icônes: The Holy Grail of almost all the popular icon sets available online. Comes with different options, searches, and is open-source.
Iconscout: 3300+ free vector icons with 3 different styles and 27 categories to choose from.
Eva Icons: They have icons for common actions and items. They can also be used as an NPM package.
Ikonate: Ready-to-use fully customizable icons. You can even change the cap and corner of each icon separately.
Icon store: Choose from the colored, glyph, or outlined icons available under a varied set of categories.
Flaticon: With more than 3,545,000 icons at your disposal, it's one of the largest collections of icons available.
The Noun Project: It doubles as both an icon and a photo resource. They specialize in their categories like "Diversity in Tech", "Work from Home" etc.
Font Awesome: Still the king! It stands out because of the regular updates they have on their icon set, comes with 5 types of icon styles, and has robust support to use in your code.
Iconfinder: 4,949,683 SVG icons. Talk about numbers!

Best Color Palette Resources

Vangogh: This is a search engine for color pallets. Just search for any color by word or hex value, it will return different pallets along with a nice dotted graph for more detailed information on each color used.
Colors and Fonts: As the name goes they also have fonts available. But their pallet comes with a search option, resources section, and click-to-copy hex colors.
calcolor: This is your resource to get to know about any color. Just enter the hex value, get similar colors, add to your favorites, and more.
Eva Design System - Deep Learning Generator: Enter your brand color, and get semantic colors with the power of a deep learning algorithm.
Eggradients: All of your gradients and color pallets presented to you in the form of 200+ egg shapes.
Happy Hues: The best way to get theme colors for your website or app. They have curated pallets with live previews.
Khroma: It uses AI to learn which colors you like and creates limitless palettes for you to discover, search, and save.
Coolors.co: One of the most popular resources to get thousands of color schemes with support for Adobe, iOS, Chrome, and more.
Color Hunt: Also available as a Chrome extension this is a free and open platform for color inspiration.
Muzli Colors: Generate pallets with hex code, color name, or even by uploading an image. Then bookmark the pallet, copy the link, or even download the entire color scheme as SVG.

Best Graphics Resources

Moose - Photo Creator: This is something different. Instead of searching for stock photos, here you create your own. Definitely for those who want to stand out in their image search.
Pexels: One of the best content for free stock images and videos with challenges for creators.
Unsplash: They are the ones who accept only the finest quality images with varied categories.
Shutterstock: Get royalty-free stock photos, pictures images, vectors, illustrations, editorial, footage, and music!
Pixabay: They have over 1.8 million+ high-quality images and videos.
Burst: Created by Shopify, use them for both non-commercial and commercial purposes without attribution.
Adobe Stock: Apart from the usual images, you also get 3D assets for your projects.
Coverr: Stock videos free to download for commercial and non-commercial use.
Mixkit: Created by Evanto, this has high-quality, curated videos and animations.
Motion Places: This one has videos from different places around the world for you to choose location-based content.

Best Font Resources

Fonts in the Wild: They have both Adobe and Google fonts under one roof along with free ones to choose from.
Fonts In Use: This is an archive of typographic design, indexed by typeface, format, and topic.
Typewolf: Get font recommendations, see what's trending, and get guides and resources.
Free Faces: Browse fonts by styles and get all the information you need for that typeface.
Freebiesbug - Free Fonts: Get handpicked free fonts for your web and graphics need.
Font Pairings from Colors and Fonts: With real-time contrast checking with colors, this comes with one of the best pairings for fonts available.
Font in Logo: Find all the fonts used by the world's biggest brands for inspiration.
FontsArena: Free fonts and suggested alternatives with multiple categories.
FontSpark: Just type any word to test fonts, then tweak the filters and get the fonts you need.
Typespiration: Enter keywords, add colors for some real-world inspiration.