Like stock photos and stock videos, you can download and use royalty-free illustrations to create beautiful designs. These websites pack a range of no-attribution, copyright-free illustrations and vectors.
Stock photos now often become memes on the internet, and it's often difficult to take them seriously. Savvy netizens can spot one a mile away. But illustrations aren't over-used, and so they add charm and delight. Plus, you can usually change their color scheme to complement your own design or logo.
In today's times, if you're using art to represent people, it should be representative of all people. Illustrator Pablo Stanley has hand-drawn a massive and diverse library of people, with simple options to customize them as you'd want.
For each person, you can change their hairstyle, facial hair, facial expressions, eyewear, body type, activity, and colors. You can sample a few of these in the grab-and-go readymade avatars, where you'll find diverse people standing, sitting, or doing some other activity.
Alternately, download the full library and use it in an illustration app. And yes, the Open Peeps library is free for commercial and personal use. You don't even need to attribute the source, but remember, it's always nice to do that.
In 2016, artist Vijay Verma took on a 100-day challenge where he would draw a new illustration every day. Eventually, he turned it into a cool pack called illlustrations (with three Ls) and made it publicly available for download with an open source license. That means you are free to use any of these for personal or commercial purposes.
After the initial 100-day challenge, Verma has drawn more of these and added them to the pack. Recently, he drew 10 illustrations on COVID-19 that everyone will want to check out. All illustrations come in AI, SVG, EPS, and PNG file formats for you to edit. You can download them all at once, or pick and choose.
Scale by Flexiple is releasing a new open-source illustration every day, to use in a variety of settings. All illustrations are free to use, with no attribution required. Each illustration is available as SVG and PNG, and you can change the color template before downloading.
The topic of the illustrations varies, including both work-related scenarios as well as home life and recreation. You'll find apt illustrations for working from home, project tasks, hiring and recruitment, exercise and gaming, etc.
Scale says it will soon add gender and skin color options for each illustration, to diversify and customize your design.
Copyright expires after a certain period, and unless renewed, great art can be used freely by anyone. It might surprise you to see the number of classical art pieces available for anyone to use in personal or commercial projects, without any attribution required. Head to ArtVee to see your options.
ArtVee is a collection of classical paintings, vintage posters, and book and magazine covers, all available in high-resolution files. Browse by categories such as abstract, landscape, mythology, historical, animals, etc.
It also hosts separate sections for popular artists, book illustrations, and weekly picks of lesser-known artworks. Click any image to read more about the artist before downloading it. Also check out the Collections section for curated artworks, such as fairy tale illustrations, New York Sunday World posters, Biblical illustrations, and more.
Design.Dev offers free design resources for creative people. While you'll need the premium account to get quality prints or website templates, those looking for illustrations are in for a treat. Most of the packs are free, across a variety of categories.
The free illustration packs include office lifestyle, work/business, city and city outlines, animal lines, abstract backgrounds, flags and banners, vector houses, health and wellness, nature, and interchangeable vector people. You'll have to register to download these, but you don't have to pay a penny. Design.Dev's illustrations have a unique style that you won't find easily on the internet, thus making you more noticeable in a crowded market.
RetroVectors is a fascinating collection of free retro-style vectors, from Victorian designs to vintage poster styles. It also includes fonts and design inspiration to go with the images you're downloading.
All files on RetroVectors are royalty-free and free of charge, so you can use them for commercial purposes too. The website broadly divides its stock illustrations in Victorian, 40s-50s-60s, and 70s-80s, most of which cost $2 for the pack. But there's also a large collection of Free Vectors you should check out, with over 70 packs of vectors. You'll certainly find something worth using in those.
Apart from the names already in this list, there are several other free stock illustration sites to download vectors. FreeIllustrations.xyz is trying to collect the best such packs in one place so you can easily find them later. It's like an Unsplash or Pixabay for illustrations.
At the moment, there isn't a search function (it's coming soon), but you can filter the packs by file type. Each pack has a short description of what you can expect inside, and the file types you'll get. Most of the mentions in this list are copyright-free and don't require attribution.
If you often rely on illustration packs for designs, then bookmark this website along with bookmarking this article.
Adobe Illustrator is undoubtedly the best app to work with vectors and illustrations. But it costs a pretty penny, and unless you're using the whole Adobe Creative Cloud suite, it might not be worth paying for.
Instead, you should check out some of the best free browser-based Adobe Illustrator alternatives. They are fantastic for basic editing of vectors, compatible with common file formats like Ai and SVG, and work on any platform.
