“You’re only as good as the tools you use”

This saying has been around for years and highlights the importance of using the correct tool for the job. This motto applies to hundreds of different fields and disciplines, and luckily for us, to the design too.

From my experience as a senior product designer, there is almost nothing more important than the correct tools to create a nice user interface. The right set of pictures or a well-balanced colour palette can make a huge difference between a poor and decent UI.

I’m going to share a list of free and very useful resources/tools that I use daily to create users interfaces (websites, landing pages, web applications, etc…) for my clients, and for my projects Cruip and SaaS Landing Page.

To allow you to easily find a specific set of resources/tools, I divided the list into different categories:

• Photos & Videos
• Illustrations
• Palette
• Typography
• Animations & Effects
• Iconography
• Patterns & Shapes
• Utility

So if you’re looking for a free set of icons, just jump to the iconography category.

A final note: This list doesn't include some of the most popular resources to create user interfaces like Unsplash (for the Photos & Videos category), or Google Fonts (for the Typography one). Why? You probably already know them.

50+ free tools and resources to create amazing UIs:

Photos & Videos

Coverr

Beautiful, free videos for your homepage background.

Mixkit

Awesome stock video clips, stock music & premiere pro templates all completely free!

Pexels

The best free stock photos & videos shared by talented creators.

Photo Creator

Create realistic stock photos from thousands of models, objects, and backgrounds.

Unscreen

Remove video and GIF backgrounds 100% automatically.

Remove Background

Remove the background of any image 100% automatically.

Generated Photos

The most practical way to get high-quality generated faces for commercial content.

Duotone

Convert any photo to a duotone in seconds.

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Illustrations

Notioly

Beautiful Notion-style illustrations.

Open Peeps

100% free hand-drawn illustration library.

Smash Illustrations

Free mix & match illustration constructor.

Open Doodles

A collection of free sketchy illustrations.

Control Illustrations

108 free flat illustrations with customisable characters.

Ouch!

Free vector illustrations to class up your project.

Avataaars Generator

A simple web app for generating hand-drawn avatars.

Faux Code Generator

Turn real code (Github Gist) into faux code (SVG image).

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Palette

Parametric Color Mixer

A colour palette composer inspired by audio parametric equalisers.

CSS Gradient

A simple and colorful CSS gradient generator.

Colorsinspo

Thousands of beautiful colour palettes you can use in one click.

Color Hexa

A free colour tool providing information about any colour and generating matching colour palettes, shades/tints for your designs.

Color Space

Generate nice colour palettes, gradients, and matching colour schemes for your next project!

Palettte App

Create, analyse and edit smooth colour palettes.

Colorable

A colour combination contrast tester.

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Typography

Freebiesbug (free fonts)

Handpicked free fonts and typefaces for web and graphics designers.

Fonts Arena

Free fonts, and free alternatives to premium fonts.

Befonts

Download the free fonts for personal or commercial use.

Font Squirrel

Download thousands of completely legal, high quality, free fonts.

Fontjoy

Easily mix and match different Google Fonts for the perfect pairing.

Type Scale

Preview and choose the right type scale for your project. Experiment with font size, scale and different web fonts.

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Animations & Effects

Smooth Shadow Generator

Make a smooth shadow with easing curves.

CSSeffectsSnippets

A collection of CSS effects made with Vue.js.

Separator Generator

A collection of customisable CSS section separators, with the possibility to easily copy the code.

Animista

A place where you can play with a collection of ready to use CSS animations, tweak them and download only those you will actually use.

Draggable

A lightweight, responsive, modern drag & drop library.

Block Reveal Effects

Ideas for revealing content in a schematic box look.

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Iconography

IconStore

A library of free vector icons for personal and commercial projects, designed by first-class designers.

CSS Icons

Open-source CSS, SVG and Figma UI Icons available in SVG Sprite, styled-components, NPM &
API.

Icon Transition Generator

Create a snappy transition between two icons and download the SVG code.

Tilda Icons

A collection of 700+ free icons for landing pages.

Ikonate

Fully customisable & accessible vector icons.

Eva Icons

Eva Icons is a pack of more than 480 beautifully crafted Open Source icons for common actions and items.

Animated Icons

400 free animated icons downloadable in JSON for Lottie, GIF, and After Effects format.

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Patterns & Shapes

CSS Patterns

CSS only library to fill your empty background with beautiful patterns.

Get Waves

A simple web app to generate svg waves, unique every time.

Blob Maker

Create organic SVG shapes in just a few seconds.

Rad Lines

A web tool for generating SVGs of polygons for plotting.

Patterns

Free collection of beautiful patterns for all vector formats.

Scribbbles

100+ vectorised scribbbles to spice up your design projects.

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Utility

Nucleo App

A powerful application to collect, customise and export all your icons.

Checklist design

A collection of the best UX and UI practices.

Design System Repo

A comprehensive and curated list of design systems, style guides and pattern libraries that you can use for inspiration.

CSSPeeper

Inspect styles in a simple, well-organised & beautiful way.

AI Image Upscaler

Enlarge and enhance images automatically using AI.

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Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this list of free tools and resources. Hungry for more? Take a look at part 2 here.