Guide
The design resources directory sorts asset hunting into ten groups: free photo libraries, illustrations & 3D, icons, fonts, colours, mockups, design tools, compression & format tools, inspiration, and audio/video assets — 123 entries. Each has a one-line editor’s note on the site’s style, strengths and limits ("the free tier limits size", "images are uploaded", "commercial use needs attribution").
Updated 2026-09-294 sources10 min read
The design resources directory sorts asset hunting into ten groups: free photo libraries, illustrations & 3D, icons, fonts, colours, mockups, design tools, compression & format tools, inspiration, and audio/video assets — 123 entries. Each has a one-line editor’s note on the site’s style, strengths and limits ("the free tier limits size", "images are uploaded", "commercial use needs attribution").
The most important column on this page is licensing. Almost every asset dispute starts with "I thought free meant free for commercial use": Unsplash stopped being CC0 after 2017, Flaticon free downloads require attribution, licences can differ between assets on the same site (Freesound, Wikimedia Commons), and very few Chinese fonts are free for commercial use. So every entry labels its licence — CC0, OFL, MIT, Apache, GPL, MPL, CC-BY, free commercial (site’s own licence), attribution required, personal use free, proprietary — with "commercial use" and "no attribution" toggles and a licence dropdown.
Anything toolun can do locally in the browser is also listed as an on-site entry (compression, format conversion, resizing, cutout, colour picking, gradients, favicon, text cards, audio and video work), and off-site tools of the same kind are marked “Do it here” — for operations like compressing or cutting out an image before delivery, where the original artwork would otherwise be uploaded, keeping it inside the browser is the better default.
Pick “Fonts” and tick “No attribution needed”:
Search “cutout”:
Google Fonts OFL 1700+ open-source fonts, all OFL / Apache, including Noto Sans SC.
Noto Sans / Serif CJK OFL Source Han Sans / Serif, the first choice for Chinese projects.
LXGW WenKai OFL An open-source kai face, common in reading apps.
Alibaba PuHuiTi Free commercial 3.0 covers GB18030; own licence, no redistribution.
HarmonyOS Sans / MiSans / OPPO Sans Free commercial Vendor-made sans faces, free for commercial use.
Smiley Sans OFL Slanted condensed sans for headlines and posters.
Inter / JetBrains Mono / Fira Code / Maple Mono OFL UI and coding fonts.AI cutout (local) /tool/image-cutout This site: the model runs in the browser, images are never uploaded. This site · Free
remove.bg remove.bg Cloud AI cutout; the free tier only gives low resolution, and this site has a local alternative. This site can do it → image-cutout · Sign-inFrom loosest to strictest, asset licences fall into roughly five levels. Public domain / CC0: the author gives up every right, any use, no credit needed — NASA imagery, Open Doodles and the glyph part of Simple Icons sit here (note that trademark rights in a brand logo stay with the brand: what is CC0 is the SVG file, not the right to use the mark). Open-source software licences (MIT / Apache / GPL / MPL): common for icon sets and design software, allowing commercial use, modification and redistribution; MIT and Apache only ask you to keep the copyright notice, while GPL requires derivative software to be open too (it has no effect on an image made with GIMP, it only constrains the software). OFL: written for fonts, allowing commercial use and embedding in web pages / apps / PDFs and allowing modification, but a modified version must be renamed (Reserved Font Name) and the font files themselves may not be sold on their own — bundling the font into paid software is fine, selling the font is not. Site-written licences (free commercial): Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, unDraw and Alibaba PuHuiTi each wrote their own; the core is always “commercial use yes, attribution optional, redistribution or a competing service no”, with details differing (Pexels forbids using photos of people to imply endorsement, PuHuiTi forbids embedding it into a font product). CC-BY / attribution required: free but you must credit the author and the source, and CC BY-SA additionally requires derivatives to carry the same licence — the free tiers of Flaticon, Freepik and Storyset are at this level.
A Chinese typeface has to draw six thousand to twenty thousand glyphs, which makes it very expensive to make, so there are far fewer free-for-commercial Chinese fonts than Latin ones. Roughly three kinds can be used commercially without worry: OFL open-source fonts (Source Han Sans / Serif, Noto CJK, LXGW WenKai, Smiley Sans, Maple Mono); free commercial fonts released by vendors for brand promotion (Alibaba PuHuiTi, HarmonyOS Sans, MiSans, OPPO Sans, the ZCOOL series); and operating-system fonts used inside that system. System or commercial fonts such as Microsoft YaHei, PingFang, Founder and Hanyi cannot be used freely in published designs, web embedding or video — the copyright in Microsoft YaHei belongs to Founder, and the Windows licence only covers displaying it on Windows. Before using a typeface on a poster, in a video or on a web page, check its licence first; the “Fonts” group here only lists fonts that are explicitly cleared for commercial use.
For operations like compressing, cutting out or converting, off-site tools almost all upload the file to a server and send back a result (TinyPNG, remove.bg), and only a few (Squoosh) work in the browser. Uploading means the original artwork passes through a third-party server, which is a risk for unpublished designs, client material or photos of people. Every image and media tool on toolun runs locally in the browser and its code can be inspected, which is why the “Compression and format tools” group puts the on-site tools first; the off-site ones stay because they offer something the site does not (TinyPNG's API, Squoosh's per-format comparison), and their reviews say so with “images are uploaded”.
Work on Dribbble, Behance, Awwwards and Mobbin is protected by copyright: you can look, you cannot lift it. Their value is style reference and learning the process. “Free for personal use” in the “Inspiration and reference” group mostly refers to how much you can view and has nothing to do with commercial licensing — not one entry in that group may be downloaded and used commercially.
A palette tool outputs colour values, so there is no licensing question in the tool itself; the real constraint comes from accessibility: WCAG 2.x requires body text to reach a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 (AA) and large text at least 3:1, with AAA asking for 7:1 and 4.5:1. Scales designed for contrast such as Radix Colors and Open Color have that worked out already; when building your own, check it with this site's colour tools or the WebAIM Contrast Checker.
Take a photo from “Stock” with “No attribution needed” → pick an OFL or free commercial Chinese font in “Fonts” → take a scheme from “Colour” → lay it out in this site's image editor → deliver with Image Compress.
Pick icons by licence in the "Icons" group: MIT sets such as Lucide / Phosphor / Tabler are free to use; Remix Icon and IconPark are also open source and commercial-friendly; for brand logos use Simple Icons but mind the trademarks.
“Illustration and 3D”: unDraw lets you change the accent colour online, Open Doodles and Humaaans are CC0, and Storyset's free tier needs attribution.
The “Fonts” group: Fontsource packages the same OFL fonts as npm packages, or download Noto Sans SC, subset it and serve it yourself.
Yes to commercial use, and credit is encouraged rather than required. The Unsplash License does forbid redistributing or selling the photos, or using them to build a service that competes with Unsplash; anything downloaded before 2017 is CC0, later downloads fall under the site's own licence.
Yes. OFL allows commercial use, embedding as a webfont, and bundling into software and PDFs. What it does not allow is selling the font files on their own, or distributing a modified version without renaming it.
Microsoft YaHei was designed by Founder and Microsoft only bought the licence to display it inside Windows. Using it in a published poster, video or web embed requires a separate commercial licence from Founder. Use Source Han Sans, Alibaba PuHuiTi or HarmonyOS Sans instead.
Write “author / source site / licence” next to the work or in the page footer, for example "Icon by Freepik from Flaticon (CC BY 3.0)". Put it in the closing credits for video and on the copyright page for print. The resource site's attribution guide decides the exact format.
No. Every tool marked “On-site” runs locally in the browser and releases the data when the page is closed; that is why they come before the off-site ones.
The directory data loads statically with the page; search, filtering and bookmarks happen locally in the browser, and this page sends no requests and records no clicks. Outbound links open in a new tab with rel="noopener noreferrer" and are then governed by the other site's privacy policy. Tools marked “On-site” process files in the browser and do not upload them.
Updated 2026-09-29
123 design and creative resources covering stock media, illustrations, icons, fonts, palettes, mockups, tools, inspiration, and audio/video assets, with license filters
The highest-quality free photo library; its own licence since 2017 (not CC0): commercial use allowed, redistribution forbidden.
Photos plus free stock video, with a Chinese interface; the licence is similar to Unsplash's.
Photos, illustrations, vectors and music; older content is CC0, newer content under its own licence.
Mostly e-commerce scenes (products, shops, lifestyle), CC0.
Lifestyle and interior photos, each with a matching colour palette.
CC0 photos, filterable by popularity and date.
A free photo site run by one photographer, with a consistent style.
NASA's space and Earth imagery, mostly public domain; a few items carry third-party copyright.
Over 100 million media files with per-file licences (a mix of CC0, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA); a treasure trove of historical images.
Public-domain old paintings and free photos; some content needs a login or payment.
A CC0 photo library contributed by Chinese photographers, with a consistent style.
Flat SVG illustrations whose accent colour you can change on the site; its own open licence allows commercial use.
Freepik's editable online illustrations; the free tier requires attribution.
Thousands of free SVG/PNG illustrations in several styles, with recolouring.
Hand-drawn line characters, CC0; ideal for empty states.
A mix-and-match character illustration library, CC0.
Composable illustrations from many artists; the free tier limits sizes.
100 open-source illustrations, MIT.
Surreal hand-drawn illustrations; the free tier requires attribution.
160,000 3D shape PNGs; the free tier requires attribution.
The free section of IconScout's 3D illustrations; attribution required, check each item for commercial use.
A Lottie motion library; the free section is mostly under the Lottie Simple License and needs attribution.
1500+ line icons with clear semantics and packages for every framework.
A large icon set in six consistent weights; a time-saver for design systems.
5000+ outline and solid icons with broad coverage.
Tailwind's official icons in three sizes and two styles.
2800+ neutral-style icons maintained by a Chinese developer, outline and solid in pairs.
Unified API access to 200+ icon sets, loaded on demand; the framework is MIT and each set keeps its own licence.
Brand-logo SVGs: the artwork is CC0, but trademarks stay with their owners.
Google's variable icon font with adjustable weight, fill and optical size.
Microsoft's 3D, flat and monochrome emoji sets, MIT.
An open-source emoji set with a consistent line style, CC BY-SA.
The largest commercial icon library; free downloads need attribution, Premium does not.
Millions of icons; free use requires CC BY attribution, paid use does not.
From ByteDance: 2400+ icons whose weight and style you can tweak online.
This site: one image in, a full favicon, Apple Touch Icon and manifest set out.
1700+ open-source fonts, all OFL or Apache, including Noto Sans SC.
The pan-CJK family from Google and Adobe (Source Han Sans / Serif), OFL and the first choice for Chinese projects.
Adobe's edition of the Source Han fonts, same origin as Noto CJK, OFL.
A sans designed for screens and one of the de facto UI standards, OFL.
A coding monospace with good ligatures and legible glyphs, OFL.
The pioneer of ligature coding fonts, OFL.
Open-source fonts packaged for npm, a self-hosted replacement for the Google Fonts CDN.
Hand-picked free commercial Latin fonts, plus a webfont generator.
An open-source kai-style face derived from Klee One, OFL; popular for reading apps.
A slanted condensed sans for headlines and posters, OFL.
A rounded CJK monospace with 2:1 Chinese/Latin alignment, OFL.
Alibaba's free-for-commercial-use sans; 3.0 covers GB18030, under its own licence that forbids redistribution.
Huawei's HarmonyOS typeface: free for commercial use, with many weights.
Xiaomi's free-for-commercial-use sans, in 10 weights.
OPPO's free-for-commercial-use typeface, covering Chinese and Latin.
Zcool's Gaoduanhei, Kuaile and Xiaowei logo faces and more, free for commercial use.
An aggregator and search for free commercial Chinese fonts; before commercial use, check the author's licence page.
This site: turn text into Unicode script, double-struck or circled characters for social nicknames.
Hit space for a random palette, lock the colours you like and keep going; export in several formats.
Apply a palette straight to a sample page to see how it looks.
Turn one colour value into a Tailwind 50–950 scale.
A 12-step scale built for accessible contrast, with paired light and dark modes.
An open-source UI palette of 13 colours × 10 levels, MIT.
Community-submitted four-colour palettes, browsable by trend.
Traditional Chinese colour names and values, for picking colours in Chinese-style design.
250 traditional Japanese colours with names and CMYK values.
Generate palettes from the colour wheel and harmony rules, and extract dominant colours from an image.
Pick 50 colours you like to train a model that generates personal palettes.
WCAG contrast checking.
This site: format conversion, scale generation, contrast checks and an on-screen colour picker.
This site: extract dominant colours and a palette from an image.
This site: tune a gradient visually and copy the CSS.
Thousands of device and scene mockups; the free tier limits downloads.
Add device frames and backgrounds to screenshots in the browser, free and without login.
Put a browser-window frame around a screenshot in a second.
An aggregator of free PSD mockups; check each licence.
High-quality device mockups; the free section allows commercial use with attribution.
Free Figma and PSD mockups.
Search the Figma community for device frames, most under CC BY 4.0.
This site: lay out a passage of text as a social-share card image.
The de facto UI design standard; three free files are enough for personal use.
An open-source Figma alternative that can be self-hosted, exporting standard SVG and CSS.
Templates for posters, slides and covers; the fastest way for non-designers to start.
Photoshop in the browser: open PSDs with no install, free with ads.
An open-source bitmap editor: full-featured but old-school.
Open-source painting software aimed at illustration and comics.
An open-source vector editor, SVG-native.
Hand-drawn-style whiteboard and diagrams, saved locally.
An infinite-canvas whiteboard, free on the web; its SDK has been under a proprietary licence since 2024.
An online design-collaboration tool covering design, prototyping and handoff; the free tier is enough.
A Figma-style online design tool with plenty of Chinese-language assets in its community.
An online collaborative design tool that combines whiteboard and prototyping.
This site: crop, adjust colour, filter, cut out, add text and watermark, all in the browser.
This site: batch-compress JPG, PNG and WebP, with an optional target size.
This site: convert between HEIC, WebP, AVIF, PNG and JPG.
This site: scale by pixels, percentage or longest edge, in batches.
The veteran online lossy compressor: free for 20 images up to 5 MB each; images are uploaded.
Google's browser-side compressor with intuitive format and parameter comparison.
A GUI for SVGO: slim down an SVG and compare in one click.
Convert SVG into React components.
Cloud AI cutout; the free tier only gives low resolution, so this site offers a local cutout tool.
This site: the model runs in the browser and images are never uploaded.
This site: shrink the images inside a PDF, handy before emailing a portfolio.
This site: compress a video down to a size WeChat will send.
A designer showcase for visual references; the work cannot be used commercially as-is.
Adobe's portfolio platform, with many complete project walkthroughs.
A screenshot library of real app interfaces, searchable by flow and component; the free tier is limited.
A curated collection of web design with an avant-garde bent.
Web design awards; study the winners for motion and storytelling.
A landing-page collection, filterable by industry and style.
Web and app interface references from real products, organised by page type.
Interface patterns and user psychology, explaining why they work.
UX principles such as Fitts's and Hick's law, one per page, with a Chinese edition.
Design checklists organised by page and component.
A Chinese designer community; a reference for Chinese typography and styling.
Chinese design news and tutorials; its own directory is comprehensive too.
Hundreds of thousands of sound effects under a mix of CC0 and CC BY; check each item before downloading.
Envato's free video, music and sound effects, under its own licence and usable commercially.
Free background videos for the web.
Pexels' video section, with plenty of 4K footage.
A CC-licensed music library, filterable by licence type.
The free BGM the video world has worn out; CC BY, attribution required.
Music and sound effects YouTube creators can use for free, via a Studio login.
This site: convert, compress, trim, extract audio and make GIFs, all in the browser.
This site: an ambient-sound generator that doubles as a quick sound effect.