Who doesn’t love free stuff? From the amateur designer, making a flyer for his daughter’s soccer tournament, to the creative director of a high-profile magazine, everyone could use another free font, stock photo, or vector swirl to add to their hard drive. Being one of those ‘starving student’ types myself, I, especially, can appreciate something with a price tag of a big fat zero. So, to save you some time, and endless google searches, I’ve put together this handy list of free resources that I use on an almost daily basis.

Fonts
As much as I’d like to, we can’t use helvetica for everything, so here are some sites dedicated to sharing free fonts. Usually you have to do some digging, as, with everything, you get what you pay for, but you can find some really nice fonts from these sites. NOTE: All the sites listed support fonts for Windoze and OSX

Da Font
Nicely organized via categories, over 9,000 fonts to choose from.

Urban Fonts
Another free font site with a nice UI, and great selection

1001 Free Fonts
Similar to Da Font, but a different selection of fonts.

Stock Photos
Not a photographer? Can’t afford to pay one? On a tight schedule? Just plain lazy? All of these reasons lend themselves to the advent of free stock photography exchange sites. Here are a few of my favourites.

stock.xchng
While registration is required to download the photos, the process is free of charge, and worth every penny. One of the most well organized databases of photos I’ve ever encountered.

Stock Vault
A completely free stock photography resource, I’ve used photos from here for many projects, takes a while to dig through the categories, but there are many fantastic pictures available. Only downfall is the amount of ads covering each page.

Vectors
Vectors are quickly becoming one of the most popular resources shared on the web. Many packages are available for download from different design firms and smaller companies. Lucky for use cheapos they give free sample packs to many of the free vector distributors. Between the free samples, and other packages available for free to begin with, you can easily find a vector graphic to fit your design after a little digging.

Vecteezy
One of the more popular vector sharing sites on the ‘net, vecteezy updates its selection daily and I check the homepage often, not only for resources, but inspiration for my own projects. They also have sister-sites dedicated to Photoshop brushes, Flash resources, and website themes.

Free Vectors
Another site dedicated to, you guessed it, free vectors. The one drawback with this site is the lack of any sort of organization method, the graphics are simply listed in order of date added. A decent search function does exist, helping to narrow your selection.

Vector 4 Free
I haven’t used this site a whole lot, but one of my classmates swears by it, and from what I’ve seen, it’s a great resource.

Misc. Free Stuff
Fonts, photos, and vectors aren’t the only free resources available to designers and production artists online, these sites offer something unique, and are important enough to warrant inclusion in this list.

COLOURlovers
One of my favourite sites at the moment, constantly updating with new user-submited colour schemes and patterns that are available for download in a multitude of filetypes. Also have a very interesting blog and other community features. Zero ads, which is nice.

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