You know that feeling when you're busy in the office or working from HOME but that piece of work just isn't coming together? You don't have the time to sort something from scratch so you decide to search for some free vector art online – but it's not always easy to find what you're looking for.
A good selection of free resources – including free fonts and free vector art – can be a lifesaver for any designer. But more often than not, the process of finding what you need amidst cluttered, confusing pages just adds to the mounting deadline stress.
To help you avoid that experience, we've put together a hand-picked guide to the best free vector art resources, including various useful designs you can download in preparation for future projects. Please note and respect the Creative Commons licence if there is one.
01. Vexels
[youtube
Vexels features thousands of free vector graphics and designs, organised into easy-to-browse categories. It also offers an online editor that enables you to customise vector designs in the browser, adjusting layouts, adding new elements and changing things like colours and text, so they're ready to go as soon as you download them.
02. Freedesignfile
This resource is crammed with thousands of free vectors and much more besides, including free Photoshop brushes and actions, photography and fonts. Freedesignfile is a great place to quickly find vector design elements and entire vector images, ready to be edited in Illustrator. All its images are free for personal use, and most can be used commercially.
03. BrandEPS
Boasting over 9,000 brand logos and more than 3,000 brand icons, BrandEPS is a great place to go if you need a logo in a hurry. Its free downloads include files in SVG format, as well as JPG and PNG if you're not fussy about scaling. It's easy to search and if you're not really sure what you're after you can also browse the latest arrivals.
04. Vector4Free
The collection at Vector4Free isn't huge – at just over 1,500 free vectors it's much smaller than many of the other sites featured here – but the quality is pretty consistent and everything is well tagged so it's easy to find what you're looking for. All the featured vector images are free for personal use, but check before using them commercially.
05. Vector.Me
The team behind Vector.Me couldn't find a search engine for free vectors with a complete collection and flexible searching capabilities, so they decided to build their own. It's absolutely packed with over 280,000 vectors, and there are separate logo and icon sections in case that's all you're after.
06. Freepik
Freepik calls itself the "leading search engine of free vector designs". Created to help you find free vector art, illustrations, icons, PSD and photos for use in your designs, Freepik produces hundreds of free vectors daily. In total, it offers over one million free vectors and photos, which can be downloaded in AI, EPS or SVG format.
07. Flaticon
FlatIcon boasts over 650,000 free vector icons. Its database is packed with free icons available in PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD and BASE 64 formats, so whatever type of vector icon you're looking for, you're likely to find it here. Some of its most popular sets include free social media icons in various styles.
08. Fudgegraphics
Fudgegraphics is a creative blog run by designer Franz Jeitz so it doesn't have a huge selection of freebies like most vector stock sites. However, everything here is made to a high quality, including one of the best free splatter vector files available online, so it's definitely worth including in your search for free vector art.
09. FreeVectors.net
Launched back in 2007, FreeVectors.net is a fun community of vector-lovers who share free vector graphics. The most recently added vectors are displayed at the top of the page, and all are free for personal use (with most of them free for commercial use too).
10. Free Downloads
The team at Free Downloads scour the web for the best free graphics for designers. With thousands of free vectors alongside photos, brushes, gradients, PSDs, fonts and more – as well as high-quality graphics produced in-house – it won't take you long to find the vector you want.
11. DryIcons
DryIcons gives you over 6500 high-quality web and vector icons
DryIcons is an icon-developing website that creates unique icons and icon sets, vector graphics and web templates and – initially – gives them away freely, with its Free License.
That means you can use DryIcons' icons, vector graphics and web templates in any publicly accessible website, web application or any form of publicly accessible presentation, according to some basic terms and conditions – which you'll find on the site.
12. Snap2objects
A nice clean site with lots of great free vector art. The blog-style layout is a bit time consuming to browse but you can find a lot of gems including excellent city vector shapes for New York, Paris, Myrtle Beach, Moscow and Tokyo.
Next page: 12 more places to find free vector art online…
13. Vectorportal
Vectorportal contains a wealth of free vector art, which designers can use in both personal and commercial projects. Easy to navigate, you can filter your search using the drop down category box or search bar. With an extensive library of artwork, you're sure to find something of use here.
14. DeviantArt
One of the largest artist communities on the web, DeviantArt is full of free and useful resources, including vectors. However, finding exactly what you're after in the crowd of chaos can be tricky. The search bar and Resources and Stock Images link will narrow things down for you, and no doubt you'll come across lots of free vector goodies.
15. Brands of the World
Brands of the World is an invaluable timesaver if you're designing for corporate clients and don't want to sit around waiting for someone to forward you a hi-res version of a certain logo. You can just find it here.
16. Spoon Graphics
Spoon Graphics is a great blog offering plenty of useful free vector art
This personal blog belonging to designer Chris Spooner features a large number of well-made, original freebies. Come for the free vector art, stay for the excellent and insightful articles!
17. Vecteezy
Popular site Vecteezy is a one-stop shop for any free vector art you can think of. However the quality does vary, so you may have to spend time wading through mediocre vectors before finding something that is good enough to use. It's worth the time though, because there are some quality vector graphics to be found here.
18. DesignContest
DesignContest is more of a commission site and extremely tricky to navigate if you're just looking for free vector art. However, it does offer a well-designed free T-shirt template and various other free icons.
19. Free Vector Archive
A big stock vector site with very efficient browsing options. You can search by colour, theme, popularity or file extension. It's clean to navigate and free from distracting ads. All in all, a superb place to search for free vector art.
20. All-Silhouettes.com
Despite being heavy on adverts, All Silhouettes trumps many other free vector art websites in that everything is clearly labelled, fairly quick to navigate and the vast selection is available as bumper vector packs rather than single images.
21. VectorStock
VectorStock's main business is a library of reasonably-priced vector imagery, but as a handy aside it also boasts a substantial collection of free vectors. They're all available in EPS format, and it's nice and easy to create an account and start downloading.
22. Free Vector
With, by our reckoning, over 16,000 free vector sets available to download, you're in with a pretty good chance of finding what you want at Free Vector. To make life easier there's a good selection of categories to choose from, plus a pretty sweet collection of company logos.
Related articles:
- 50 amazing vector art tutorials
- The 100 best free fonts
- How to take your vector logo from 2D to 3D
