The design and creative resources directory sorts the business of finding assets by type into ten groups: free stock photos, illustration and 3D, icons, fonts, colour palettes, mockups, design tools, compression and format tools, inspiration and reference, and sound, music and video material — 125 entries in all. Each one carries a one-line editor's review describing the site's style, its strengths and its limits (“free plan is size-limited”, “images are uploaded”, “slow over a direct connection”).

The most important column on this page is licence. Almost every asset infringement case starts with “free must mean free for commercial use”: Unsplash stopped being CC0 after 2017, free downloads on Flaticon require attribution, on iconfont the licence of each icon is decided by whoever uploaded it, and among Chinese typefaces only a handful can be used commercially for free. So every entry is labelled with a licence type — CC0, OFL, MIT, Apache, GPL, MPL, CC-BY, free commercial (the site's own licence), attribution required, free for personal use, proprietary — and the page offers “Commercial use” and “No attribution needed” toggles plus 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.

1. 01Browse by type— click a group chip (stock / illustration / icons / fonts / colour / mockups / tools / compression / inspiration / audio and video).
2. 02Filter by licence— “Commercial use” removes personal-use and proprietary entries; “No attribution needed” keeps only CC0 / OFL / MIT / Apache / free commercial; or pick one licence in the dropdown for an exact match.
3. 03Search— type a style, a format or a use (“hand-drawn”, “monospace”, “Chinese”, “mockup”, “sound effect”, “psd”).
4. 04Bookmark— the star pins an entry to the top of the page (stored on this device).
5. 05Read the badges before downloading— the licence badge at the bottom of a card, together with “Login required” and “Works in China”, tells you what to expect after clicking through; the licence that counts is the one on the asset page at the time.

Pick “Fonts” and tick “No attribution needed”:

Search “cutout”:

Google Fonts                 OFL      1700+ open fonts, all OFL / Apache, incl. Noto Sans SC; slow on a direct connection.
Noto Sans / Serif CJK        OFL      Source Han Sans / Serif under a different name; first choice for Chinese projects.
LXGW WenKai                  OFL      Open-source kai style, common in reading apps.                    Works in China
Alibaba PuHuiTi              Free commercial  3.0 covers GB18030; own licence, no redistribution.      Works in China
HarmonyOS Sans / MiSans / OPPO Sans   Free commercial   Free commercial sans faces from phone makers.  Works in China
Smiley Sans                  OFL      Oblique condensed sans for headings and posters.                  Works in China
Inter / JetBrains Mono / Fira Code / Maple Mono   OFL   UI and coding typefaces.

AI Cutout (local)   /tool/image-cutout   On-site: the model runs in the browser, images are not uploaded.   On-site · Free · Works in China
remove.bg           remove.bg            Cloud AI cutout, free tier is low resolution only; this site has a local one.   Do it here → image-cutout · Login required

The levels of licence

From 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.

Why Chinese fonts need extra care

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.

Does an image leave your computer?

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”.

An inspiration site is not an asset site

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.

Palettes and contrast

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.

Inclusion criteria

resource sites that are explicitly cleared for commercial use or that state a clear licence, each checked for reachability on 2026-09-09; only one representative per niche, never an exhaustive list.

Licence labels

checked on each site's licence page that day and summarised into eleven unified tags, with the original wording deciding the details; assets on one site can differ (Freesound, Wikimedia Commons, iconfont), and those reviews say “check the licence item by item”.

What is not included

paid commercial libraries that only let you download after buying (Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Visual China Group); sites with no clear licence or mostly user uploads with no licence labels; pirated font sites and “free commercial font pack” download pages.

This page is not legal advice

the licence explanations are a plain-language summary by the editor, and a commercial project should rely on the licence text and legal advice.

Labels

“Works in China” is marked conservatively; “Login required” means downloading or the main features need an account.

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.

• CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)（访问日期：2026-09-09） — the legal text of CC0 and a plain-language explanation.
• SIL Open Font License 1.1（访问日期：2026-09-09） — the full OFL text and FAQ, source of the “no selling on its own” and “rename before distributing” clauses.
• Unsplash License（访问日期：2026-09-09） — the model case of a site-written licence: free commercial use, redistribution forbidden.
• Pexels License（访问日期：2026-09-09） — includes extra limits on how photos of people may be used.
• Choose a License: licence comparison（访问日期：2026-09-09） — the difference between MIT / Apache / GPL / MPL on one page.
• WCAG 2.2: Contrast (Minimum)（访问日期：2026-09-09） — the specification behind the 4.5:1 and 3:1 thresholds.