When it comes to communicating ideas or messages quickly, illustrations are your best bet. Some of the well-known companies such as Notion, Uber, Paypal, and Airbnb (at the time of this article) are using illustrations to deliver their messages.
Lucky for us, a number of authors have offered up illustrations with the ability to customize characters, colours, and scenes for free. These are great resources for those who are on a budget and looking to enhance their project.
Kind Reminder
These authors have provided illustrations for free in an effort to promote their work or business. Please consider providing credit to their work by linking it back to their website when using an illustration. This will allow them to grow and possibly continue to provide more free resources.
Humaaans
First up is Humaaans by Pablo Stanley. These illustrations are very flexible and easy to edit, which allows you to customize individual body parts to your liking.
The free download is offered through Gumroad. All you have to do is enter a price of $0 dollars, enter your email, and receive the illustrations package.
If you want to show support for Pablo Stanley, then you can enter a dollar value of your choice.
File Types: SVG, PNG
Software: Sketch, Figma, InVision Studio, Adobe Illustrator
License: Free commercial or personal use
Open Doodles
This is another project by Pablo Stanley. Style of the illustrations provide a hand-drawn feel and adds emotions to the characters.
Customization is fairly easy as well. You can use the Generator to change the desired colors.
File Types: SVG, PNG
Software: Sketch, Adobe Illustrator
License: Free commercial or personal use
Open Peeps
Once again, this is another project by Pablo Stanley. Yes, you read that correctly. Another project by Pablo Stanley. The man simply does not have an off button! And we are all greatly benefitting from his kind nature and offering yet another unique collection of illustrations.
Unlike his other projects, these illustrations are monochromatic and are more focused on the character’s expression and pose.
File Types: SVG, PNG
Software: Sketch, Figma, Adobe Illustrator
License: Free commercial or personal use (CC0)
DrawKit
Offers free, hand-drawn, and editable vector illustrations of daily activities while touching on various topics such as family, cooking, working from home, exercise, and more.
It also offers downloads through Gumroad. Enter a price of $0 dollars, enter your email, and you’ll receive the illustration package.
File Types: SVG, PNG
Software: Adobe Illustrator
License: Free commercial or personal use
Fresh Folk
An illustration library of characters and objects where you can mix and match characters with a wide range of poses, outfits, and settings.
All you have to enter is your email address and the download will be available immediately thereafter.
File Types: PSD
Software: Adobe Photoshop
License: Free commercial or personal use (CC ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL LICENSE)
Craftwork
Craftwork is made up of a group of designers, illustrators, curators, and front-end developers. They create digital resources to make your design workflow faster and easier.
Collection of illustrations offer options to change the background, design templates, and icons. You will need an account with them to access the free resources.
File Types: SVG, PNG
Software: Figma, Sketch
License: Free commercial or personal use
unDraw
Originally launched with the goal to show more designers should contribute to the open-source community in an effort to help provide beautiful design to everyone.
The download process is fairly straightforward – click on the illustration of choice and you can select SVG or PNG version.
File Types: SVG, PNG
Software: Adobe Illustrator
License: Free commercial or personal use
Sketchvalley
You will find a collection of ever-growing individual vector illustrations that you can customize to your liking.
The library is under license CC0. This means Team Meetings is Free for Commercial and Personal Use. No need to credit, license, or anything.
The free download is offered through Gumroad. All you have to do is enter a price of $0 dollars, enter your email, and receive the illustration package.
File Types: SVG, PNG
Software: Adobe Illustrator
License: Free commercial or personal use
Storyset by Freepik
Storyset offers hundreds of illustrated concepts to make your landing page, app, or presentation more visually attractive. You also have the option to animate the characters and download them as a GIF or MP4.
The download process is straightforward. Click on the illustration of your choice and you are given the option to download SVG or PNG versions.
File Types: SVG, PNG, GIF, MP4
Software: Figma, Adobe Illustrator
License: Free commercial or personal use
Ouch! by Icon8
Ouch! contains illustrations from top Dribbble artists. The biggest differentiator with Ouch! is the offering of various styles of illustrations including flat, 3D, retro, abstract, and much more.
They offer a free and a premium package. You can download a low-resolution PNG for free, but if you want the SVG version then you would need to pay for it. The low resolution comes in a reasonable size (900×900 pixels) which suitable for a blog.
File Types: PNG
Software: Any
License: Free commercial or personal use
LS Graphics
Offers both free and premium vector illustrations. There are regular updates and new illustrations for your user interfaces and other projects.
The free option only provides the PNG files but they are fairly large (1500×1500 pixels).
The only strange part about the free download process is that you have to enter your email, then you are given the option to sign up for the newsletter (which you don’t need to), afterward moves into asking for your country and postal code, and finally completes the checkout. Once the checkout has been completed, you will receive a link to download the file in your inbox.
File Types: PNG
Software: Any
License: Free commercial or personal use
Streamline
Streamline is produced by Webalys who are known for this large library of icons collections. They also offer illustrations as well and the style variety of the illustrations keep growing.
You will need an account to download the free PNG version. SVG is only available to the premium users.
File Types: PNG
Software: Any
License: Free commercial or personal use
Credit
The featured image used in this article was created as part of Open Peeps by Pablo Stanley.
