Design resources for the non-designer
Sep 13, 2013Even if you don't have the chops to be a professional designer, don't dismiss the possibility of creating a beautiful site. There are many resources on the internet to help you with your design. If you have a good eye and you know where to look you might be pleasantly surprised at the end product. From icons, graphics, colour palettes, and full-fledged themes there's something for every aspect of web design. I've compiled below a list of what I think are the best design resources to help even the non-designer.
Icons
Iconfinder & Findicons - A ton of icons for your site and easily searchable.
Font Awesome & Font Awesome More - A great icon font set that will cover pretty much all your needs. Icon fonts are great because you can easily change the size and color, and add css effects.
Fontello - This site allows you to cherry pick icons from different icon font sets to build your own icon font set.
The Noun Project - Large set of free "highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language"
Icon Sweets 2 - One of the best collections of icons I've come across that includes the photoshop source.
Photoshop
365psd - A free photoshop file every day. … I find that these are very helpful to get started. And to look at these files to see how things are done. "good artists borrow, great artists steal"
freethroww - Photoshop files that Dribbble users have made freely available.
PremiumPixels - A frequently updated archive of well designed PSDs all created by one prolific designer.
Stock Photos and Illustrations
iStock Photo - Huge collection of stock photos and vector illustration for sale. A lot of these look dated, but there is a lot of good stuff too.
Shutterstock - An istockphoto alternative.
GraphicRiver - Newer (and smaller) site, but better prices.
Themes
WrapBootstrap - Themes for sale. All of them are built with Bootstrap, giving you a great foundation.
ThemeForest - Huge collection of themes for sale including Wordpress themes and HTML themes. Lots of different types like landing pages, admin, blogs etc...
CSS Libraries
Bootstrap - Hugely popular with a large and active community (see font awesome, wrapbootstrap, and bootstrap snippets).
Foundation - Great looking alternative to Bootstrap
HTML KickStart - Another great alternative
Skeleton - Barebones library with just the essentials.
Snippets
CSS3 buttons - Nice set of buttons created with css3.
CSSDeck - Really great examples of what you can achieve with css3.
Bootsnipp - Free html snippets of common user interface components for Bootstrap.
Showcases
Dribbble - A very popular site where designers submit images of what they're working on. Lots of great talent here.
Meerli - Like dribbble but focused on mobile.
365 awesome designers - Showcases the work of a new designer every day.
Mobile Patterns - Screenshots of popular mobile apps organized according to the function of the screen (eg. "login", "news feed", ...).
iOS Mobile Patterns Library - Like mobile-patterns.com.
UX
Little Big Details - Showcases an example of a small detail on an actual site that makes for a nice user experience. Updated daily. It's fun spotting the detail before reading the description.
Beautiful Pixels - Daily handpicked examples of great user interfaces with a small writeup for each.
Fonts
Font Squirrel - A nice collection of free fonts.
Typekit by Adobe - Large collection of fonts, with a great interface for browsing and searching.
WhatTheFont! - Does a pretty good job of identifying a font in an image file.
Patterns & colours
Subtle Patterns - Great set of background patterns that can be used on your site. Can download all the patterns as a photoshop pattern file. Updated frequently.
COLOURlovers - An amazing community where users can submit color palettes, and patterns.
Flat UI Colors - A nice set of colors for those going for the "flat" design look.
Articles
Sidebar - 5 well chosen design links everyday
Designer News - User submitted articles with reddit style voting.
