The 6 Best Free and Low-Cost Design Sites to Make Your Products Irresistible

So you’ve got a killer product coming out, and to save money, you’re designing and marketing it yourself, but you want to create irresistible, un-ignorable marketing content. You want the kind of imagery that’s clean, memorable, and simplistically expresses your brand...without killing your wallet.

(Especially since the ‘trep life is all about feast or famine.)

As such, the Geek’s got you covered with websites that offer some of the highest quality design tools on the web for free or affordable prices.

Your Portal to Create Drool-worthy Designs

Fonts

 
Font Squirrel doesn’t just offer fonts that are “free with a catch” (you know, the “only free for personal use” trick), but incredible, head-turning fonts that are free under commercial license, meaning you can use it for your business without paying a dime.

Graphics (Templates, Icons, Mockups, Buttons, Themes, etc.)

 
Creative Market offers professional graphic elements for decent prices, and weekly freebie packages. However, you’ll have to set up an account with them (including a Facebook login option for your convenience).

A word of caution: Though Creative Market has wonderful photos, they licenses are not cost-effective. For great photo sites, keep reading.

 
Best PSD Freebies is much like Creative Market, but offers Photoshop-specific files and doesn’t require you to set up an account.

Photos

 

PublicDomainPictures.net is a public domain image database. Translation: free, no-attribution-necessary, commercially available high quality images. However, if you want to download the images formally, the site prompts you to set up an account. (However, you can download the image by clicking its thumbnail to view the full-sized version, then right-clicking it and selecting “Save image.”)

 
Pixabay one-ups PublicDomainPictures.net by not requiring you to set up an account. Both sites offer fantastic photos with a clean website design that makes you feel comfortable using its photos.

There are plenty of public domain image sites out there, but their designs are so basic, the experience is almost cautionary.

The Creative Commons Search image search aggregator lets you to type a keyword and allows you to search photos on various sites, including Flickr, Google Web and Google Images, Wikimedia Commons, and several others. CC Search is fantastic in that its inherent search criteria yields images with free commercial licenses (as long as you attribute and don’t sell the photo yourself).



So whether you’re designing your own business cards, slideshows, infographics, tip-o-graphics, videos, or your book cover, these sites are a great place to start to find professionally designed graphics for free or almost free. But be warned: The sheer coolness might suck you in!

Mellissa Thomas is a Jamaica-born author, award-winning screenwriter, poet, freelance writer and manuscript editor currently available for hire. She has been published in Caribbean Today, Orlando Fashion Magazine and several others; and has posted on popular blogs, including Men with Pens and Successful Blogging.

She has also published six books: including the newly released Crooked Beauty: Words on Our Imperfect Life, and In the Rough, all available on Amazon.com and major online bookstores. For more information, visit mellissathomas.com.