FAKE CROW'S BLOG

17 Of Our Favorite Stock Image and UI Design Sources

Photography, iconography, and typography are essential to help good interface design do its job well. It’s easy to take it for granted, but finding the right visual aid, with the appropriate usage rights is no small job. That’s a huge part of the value that any design team will bring to the table.

Here’s our challenge: We design user interfaces for startups. This means, we are often running at a fast pace. Hence our designathons. But we cannot compromise from quality. Over time, we have found free design sources that save us time during our ui design process. Thought these could be useful for others. Especially for startups. We hope you get as much use out of these as we have.

A big thanks to the great people behind each one of these platforms for sharing good things for free, and for everyone to use. To honor good karma, please remember to double check all licensing and usage rights, and make sure to give proper credit for each and every asset you choose to use!

Free Stock Visuals

We gave you tips on finding free to use images on google image search a while back. Since then, we’ve pinpointed a few sites that we visit, to discover and use good photography. Here are our picks:

1. Unsplash

Unsplash has become a go-to spot for beautiful images for us. They have stunning, high-quality photos to ‘do whatever you want’ with. We’ve even signed up for their email to see the new images they post every 10 days. Even if we don’t use them in a project, it’s still a great place to find some great inspiration (and desktop backgrounds!).

Unsplash’ collection contains nature, landscapes, cities, closeups. There’s no immediate way to search and find through categories. Yet. But it’s a delight to scroll through this gorgeous collection.

image by Matthew Clark – Unsplash

2. Super Famous

Superfamous is created by fellow interaction designer Folkert Gorter. This collection is largely about texture and geometry found in nature. You can scroll and browse through glorious imagery of landscapes, and cityscapes.

image by Folkert Gorter – Super Famous

3. The Noun Project

While not all of these are free, it is a great place to start when looking for iconography. They have a huge selection that continues to grow. Some are even very comical… check out ____ for a good laugh! You can get the icon for free if you give credit to the designer or you can pay $9.99 a month for unlimited downloads. It’s a great resource and definitely worth it!

4. IMCreator

IM Free offers a curated selection of resources including images, icons and templates, all for commercial use. Browse through their categories and you’ll most likely find something to suit your needs. A big portion of this collection consists of black and white photography. These capture people in urban environments, and convey a lot of emotion. They also have a few more specific categories like Tech, Cityscape, Arts & Music, Sports, etc..

image by soundman1024 – IMCreator

5. Startup Stock Photos

As the title gives it away, these photos are taken at various modern workspaces and surroundings with a startup feel. The collection includes well shot photos of people at work, interacting with computer screens, mobile screens, desktop surfaces where you can conveniently insert your own product’s visuals.

image by – Startup Stock Photos

6. Finda.Photo

Finda.photo collects 100% free images from various sites and lets users browse in one place, which is a big convenience. Currently they are serving images from; Unsplash (as mentioned above), Jay Mantri, Skitterphoto, Life of Pix, Picography and MMT. They have a few categories including “screens.” Again, good resource to find images where you can insert your UI. You can also browse images by color theme. They’ve just launched so the selection is not as wide as it could be but I hope it will expand pretty rapidly.

image by Andre Spieker – Finda.photo

7. All The Free Stock

Another resource that is a directory of more free design resources.

These are the sites that we find ourselves visiting the most to find good looking free photography. Here’s a good article that lists 53 free image sources, if you’re looking for even more options.

Paid Stock Libraries That Are Worth It

We must note that free stock won’t always cut it, when you’re looking for something specific. Here’s a set of paid stock libraries that we have been frequenting a lot recently:

8. Death To The Stock Photo

“A fresh pack to your inbox with awesome stories to match.”

This site is a growing machine. They’re making their experience to discover and browse images better every day. This is definitely more of a discovery and curation oriented site. Images are atmospheric, and tasteful. They just launched their premium service, but you can still get their free packs with beautiful new themes. You will find miscellanious images of people on their phones, in a work environment, as well as indoor spaces and objects.

Image from the “Feel Alive” Collection – Death To The Stock Photo

9. Stocksy

Arguably the best collection to find out there. Their selection is super trendy, with an instagram-like vibe, captures real people in real moments. Great change from typical stock photography’s overlit, overstaged, overly corporate mis-en-scenes. It’s refreshing to be able to find characters, niche demographics. Hipster millennials, modern families, gay couples… are types (but not stereotypes) you can come across on this site. Good things can’t always be free. Stocksy’s collection is a bit pricey, but it’s definitely worth it, if you have the budget.

10. Dollar Photo Club

This is simply a really good deal, if you need lots of stock photography, all the time. Your $10/month membership gets you 10 free downloads. Then everything on the site for $1 only. This archive is growing consistently, with more and more tasteful additions. We are a fan!

Time Saver Plugins

Convenience tools that we plug into our design softwares. These quick solutions help generate dummy content, placeholder images, and assets save us a ton of headache.

11. Pictura

Pictura is a Photoshop plugin that allows you to search Flickr images within Photoshop and filter them by licensing, which is super handy. You can download the free plugin here.

12. Other Icons

From the same creators of Pictura, comes Othericons, another free Photoshop plugin allowing you to search and apply collections of vector icons right into your file.

13. Blendme.in

Blenme.in is a plugin that works with both Photoshop and Illustrator. It allows you to search through thousands of assets and then simply drag and drop them right into your current file. They’re constantly adding new assets and hope to be “the worlds largest collection of vector assets for free.”

14. Random User Generator

Random User Generator is a photoshop plugin that allows you to click through a curated collection users to drag and drop right into your comp. While it may still take a while to click through and find an image that represents your target audience, you know each image is going to be high quality and free, which is, overall, a huge time saver!

Great (Placeholder) Content Sources

While plugins are helpful, they seem to be mostly geared toward Photoshop and since we work in both Photoshop and Illustrator most of the time we’ve had to find things that will work for both. So here are some other sites we frequent.

15. Lipsum Pro

While there are numerous lorem ipsum generators I’ve frequented this one as it’s easy and fun to use and looks nice. So until Illustrator includes a placeholder text generator, this will be my go-to.

16. Dummy Text Generator

While this is not the most attractive text generator, it comes in handy when looking to use English text instead of the typical Lorem Ipsum. We’ve found using English text makes the site look a little more polished and real when content isn’t ready yet.

17. UI Faces

UI Faces is a collection of user uploaded avatars that can be downloaded and used freely for UI mocks. They have a wide range of faces and even allow you to change the site’s background so you can see how the images will look with your color palette.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of resources, and we keep finding more daily, but these are just some of the ones we tend to frequent. Do you have any great free resource or inspiration sites you’d like to share? Hit us up on twitter @fake_crow. We’re always interested in learning about new things out there!

This list brought to you by Fake Crow’s own, Jen Valentine.

Fake Crow is a tech startup friendly UX/UI design agency.
Based in Los Angeles, we designed for 36 startups in 18 cities.