Free Illustrations

Brittany Nguyen
3 min readSep 29, 2020

I love using illustrations in my work as a UX/UI designer. They automatically bring the designs back to life — they become relatable, inspiring, and often friendly. As someone who’s currently on the job market, I don’t exactly have the funds to buy every beautiful asset I see. Luckily, there have been a plethora of designers who have been generous enough to provide amazing illustrations for free commercial and personal use. (But always check the small print for licenses of legal use, just in case.)

2. DrawKit

Drawkit is a resource of free hand drawn vector illustrations and icons. This site is also updated weekly, and the illustrations come in packs. I like that their illustrations always seem relevant and easy to use for context.

In honor of the BLM protests.

3. Humaans.

Humaans is fun. You can mix-and-match illustrations of people from the hair, body position, clothing, skin type, etc. This site provides a design library to choose from as templates and you can use your custom illustrations for free personal or commercial use.

So many people! So many types!

5. 404 Illustrations

404 Illustrations provides illustrations specific for error pages. In my opinion, these communicate far better than plain words.

How can you get angry at an error page with this?

7. Open Doodles

OpenDoodles is a set of free illustrations that you can copy, edit, remix, share, or redraw. It’s a quirky style that you can also customize to your own liking.

Some of their doodles even come in gifs.

6. Karthrik Srinivas

Karthrik Srinivas offers 3 separate packs of his handcrafted illustrations. They range in categories of 404 error, no internet connection, no service, fatal error, page not found, something went wrong, under construction, etc.

This could easily be used for a landing page.

7. unDraw

unDraw is an open-source library of illustrations to use in any project, commercial or personal without attribution or any costs. The site is constantly updated.

This is cute.

8. Blush

Last but not least, Blush is a great plug-in to access many of the designs listed above — straight in Figma or Sketch.

Well, that’s it! If you’ve got a favorite illustration designer or resource, please let me know in the comments.

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