The 65 Best Websites for Free Graphic Design Courses & Resources

In challenging economic times like today, businesses and freelancers must cut back in as many areas as possible while staying efficient. We have bulk email services, post-scheduling services, automated response services, AI chatbots, and more. But how can we save money and be more time-efficient with graphic design? Cutting back doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice quality. An abundance of excellent free graphic design courses and resources are available to help you continue producing outstanding work. Now, what if you’re not a graphic designer?

Say you run a small business but can’t afford to outsource your design work. You could have the best SEO strategy in the world, but if your website or marketing materials look like you just put something together on Microsoft Word, no one will stick around to buy what you’re selling. Whether you’re building your website, creating a visually appealing business proposal, or trying to create the perfect opt-in form for your newsletter, you’ll benefit from free graphic design courses and resources.

We’ve done the hard work for you. Here’s your guide to the 65 best websites for free graphic design courses and resources. Be sure to bookmark this page so you always have easy access.

Graphic Design Courses

Adobe Illustrator for Beginners

Adobe Illustrator is one of the premier graphic design programs out there. This free three-hour course on YouTube breaks down everything you need to know to become a pro.

CalArts Graphic Design Specialization

Available on Coursera, this class equips you with basic design skills, working toward developing your branding project.

Graphic Design Basics (Canva)

This 12-session course trains you to think and build like a graphic design pro, focusing on alignment, proximity, fonts, colors, and more.

The Graphic Design – Visual and Graphic Design (Alison)

This course examines graphic design theory, practices, and principles over four modules with a course assessment.

Graphic Design Principles Index (Duke)

If you’re looking for the philosophy behind graphic design, this Duke University mini-course covers 39 design principles.

Graphic Design Basics: Core Principles for Visual Design (Skillshare)

This 35-minute course from Skillshare introduces you to the five core principles of graphic design so you can critique your work for effectiveness and balance. This is a good course for bloggers who are trying to manage their website designs independently, regardless of the design.

Some want simple, static designs (like this one from J. Cogburn), and others prefer animated backgrounds (like Malone Law’s).

Either way, something as simple as improving your website design can boost your conversion rates, which equals more monthly income. So don’t sleep on it.

Design Principles: An Introduction

Offered by UC Davis on Coursera, this course focuses primarily on web design and is geared toward developing effective and excellent interactive designs for users.

PhotographyCourse.net

Here, you will find an exhaustive list of Udemy’s free photo editing tutorials for serious and amateur photographers.

Creative Cloud Tutorials (Adobe)

Adobe has compiled a list of free resources, inspiration, and live streams for any graphic design project.

Creating Brand Systems: An Overview of Combining Logos and Type (Skillshare)

Our second course from Skillshare, this class will guide you to understand how to create a logo and build an entire brand system in seven short sessions.

Beginners Guide To Graphic Design Without Paid Software (Udemy)

There’s nothing worse than a free course that teaches you how to use software you need to pay for! This course shows you graphic design basics using other free programs.

200+ Free & Beginner Friendly Photoshop Tutorials

Photoshop Buzz offers over 200 tutorials for everything you need to learn about Photoshop. It is the place to start if you are starting your remote business and want to impress new clients.

Fundamentals of Logo Design (Alison)

Need to create a logo for a company, even your own? Get behind the psychology of logo design and learn the keys to building a logo everyone will remember.

Typography That Works: Typographic Composition and Fonts (Skillshare)

Our final Skillshare course focuses on creating clean and bright typography so your graphical content is pleasing to the eye.

Free Graphic Design Tools

Canva

One of the most popular free design tools, Canva has over 250,000 templates for almost anything you can imagine. You can also create “brand kits” of your brand’s colors with their codes to ensure all your designs are consistent. For example, one of De Castroverde’s brand colors is #47AEB9, a turquoise-like blue. But change one number or letter—let’s say you take out the “A” in the middle—and you get a lime green. Canva makes sure your brand uses its actual colors, not variations.

​​Blender

Blender is for the pros. Blender’s got you covered if you’re looking for forever-free and open-source software to help you build any design.

Adobe Express

Adobe Express is similar to Canva in its capabilities. It’s one of the few free Adobe products. You can use it to create layers and depths with multiple items.

Gravit Designer

This tool helps you create graphics for marketing materials, websites, icons, social media, UI design, and more.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a vector drawing tool, but also much more. It’s a community of artists providing forums, chats, and tutorials to help you become a better designer.

Coolors

Looking to generate a color palette for your company’s branding quickly? Coolors lets you create up to 10 palettes with five colors each for free.

Brandpad

Brandpad helps you customize your brand identity and streamline how you deliver it.

VistaCreate

Owned by VistaPrint, VistaCreate is free graphic design software with over 50,000 templates that feel Canva-like.

Free Stock Photos & Videos

Unsplash

Unsplash probably needs no introduction. It’s the internet’s source for beautiful, royalty-free photography.

New Old Stock

New Old Stock republishes classic photos from the public archives. These are great for backgrounds on projects that need some vintage flair.

Pexels

Pexels is similar to Unsplash but also offers royalty-free stock videos.

FreePik

FreePik is a one-stop shop for free photos, videos, illustrations, vectors, and more.

Nappy

Nappy is the place for stock photo diversity. This website is for you if you want images of black, brown, and indigenous people.

Vimeo

Vimeo has 22 pages of free HD stock footage. Using a video background on your website makes it more visually stimulating than a static photo.

Cue Stock Footage

Cue Stock Footage is unique in providing free 4k videos. You can also download VFX, light leaks, overlays, backgrounds, and more. Check out the Winters & Yonker website for an example. It has a video background with a darker overlay.

Videvo

You’ll find even more stock video options on Videvo. But there’s more. They have motion graphics, video templates, and even sound effects.

Free Illustrations

Web Designer Depot

Shameless plug here: our library of free graphic design downloads doesn’t fall into one category. Illustrations, icons, fonts, mockups–you name it, we’ve got it.

Unblast

Another general resource not limited to illustrations, Unblast will save you time searching with its curated list of mockups, fonts, templates, graphics, and more.

Undraw

Undraw is an open-source library of illustrations. Download them in SVG to edit or a PNG to post on your blog or social media.

DrawKit

Get free hand-drawn vector illustrations and icons from DrawKit each week by signing up for their newsletter.

Humaaans

Humaans is a neat tool for creating human figures the way you want them to look with mix-and-match illustrations.

Pimp my Drawing

Pimp My Drawing is a free library of CAD and DWG people, silhouettes, and vector people.

Open Peeps

Like Humaaans, Open Peeps allows you to create people how you want them to look. You can download them in SVG or PNG formats.

Open Doodles

Find illustrations of people in SVG, PNG, and even GIFs on Open Doodles.

Free Illustrations

Use Free Illustrations to find any icon. To make your search easier, you can browse by file type.

Free Icons

Streamline HQ

StreamlineHQ boasts the world’s largest number of matching icon sets. This will be a goldmine that saves you gobs of time when building your website and creating your marketing materials.

Simple Icons

Simple Icons is unique in that, in addition to icons, you can find free downloads for almost 2,300 famous brand logos.

Free Icons

Free Icons has the largest database of free icons in 64 different formats.

Iconscout

If you’re looking for Apple or Google phone app icons, Iconscout has what you need. A subscription is required to download icons.

Font Awesome

Don’t let the name fool you. Font Awesome is an enormous library of icons. You must create a profile and select their free plan to get started.

Flaticons

With Flaticons, you can recolor, reshape, and choose the background for over 8,000 icons, then download them in the file type you’d like.

The Noun Project

The Noun Project offers over 3 million icons for free download and claims its collection is the most diverse on the Internet.

Free Fonts

Google Fonts

Google Fonts is a library of 1,429 open-source font families and APIs you can use on CSS and Android.

Font Squirrel

The free fonts you get from Font Squirrel are also licensed for commercial use. There’s also a convenient filter search to identify the font you’re searching for.

Velvetyne

Velvetyne is an open-source font library. Its unique niche is creating and distributing fonts with a highly poetic, aesthetic, or technical value that isn’t typically found in commercial work.

Fontfabric

Founded in Bulgaria, Fontfabric offers many free (and paid) fonts. They’ve worked with Nike, Hyundai, and Nestlé to create beautiful typefaces.

Lost Type

Featured in recent projects by Disney and Starbucks, Lost Type is the first of its kind–a foundry with a “pay what you want” policy for personal use. (If you’re looking for commercial licenses, it’s $75/font.)

The League of Moveable Type

Founded in 2009, this was the first free font foundry. They’ve worked with almost every brand you can imagine and likely created some of your favorite fonts. Click “Catalogue” in the top menu to search for free open-source fonts.

Free Mockup Tools

Screely

If you created a website spec and want to use the entire screen on a mockup, Screely can do that for you. It takes your entire screenshot and generates a mockup in seconds.

UI Faces

With UI Faces, you can create free avatars for your design mockups from various sources.

Shotsnapp

Shotsnapp combines your mockup design with a custom font selection. Their basic plan is limited, but it might do the trick if you don’t need a complicated design.

Artboard Studio

You can start three mockup projects for free on Artboard Studio. They have dozens of templates to create any mockup project easily.

House of Mockups

House of Mockups advertises it brings you the best collection of free customizable PSD mockups.

Lovely Mockups

Lovely Mockups has over 200 free and premium easy-to-use mockup templates. Explore their freebies.

Free Image Editing Tools

Free Online Image Editor

This is probably the easiest tool on our list. Upload your photo and add text, filters, resize, animated masks, and other effects.

Remove

Remove will (surprise!) remove your background from an image, allowing you to spice up a picture or change the scenery.

Fotor

Fotor is a free basic photo editor that allows users to crop and resize images, add text, create collages, and more.

BeFunky

BeFunky calls itself a simplified online version of Photoshop where you can easily edit and apply effects to photos.

Pixlr

Sometimes, you need to edit more than one photo. You need to create templates to use over and over again. With Pixlr, you can do both.

Figma

Figma allows you to create logos, social media graphics, presentations, and templates. Its unique feature is allowing collaborators on projects. Also, be sure to check out their mobile app.

Crop Circle

Crop Circle does one thing: it crops your images to a circle fast and free—no sign-up is required to download.

Free Graphic Design Courses & Resources – Wrapping It Up

There you have it. Take your graphic design to the next level without spending a dime by using these 65 free graphic design courses and resources. Start exploring and designing today!