Having been going through a lot of graphic related tools and sites you kind of get the feeling of what is worth mentioning to the people around you. And when you come across a breakthrough, you feel the need to share the information, the joy of finding something that can really bring value to the users and their work.
This is the case of an awesome tool called Freepik.com, a search engine specialized in finding free graphic resources, like stock photos, vectors, illustrations or PSD files. The tool works just like any search engine: insert the key words related to the resources you're searching for and it will scan the web in search of the most relevant results. But the best part is that its own algorithms order the output by quality and relevance, making this great to use for designers with both beginner and professional skills.
Freepik is growing steadily and adding daily hundreds of free vectors, illustrations and photos, all with licence information, the source of the image, image tags, how many times it has been downloaded and information about dimension and resolutions. When you found what you needed out of the close to 81 million free files indexed, the purchasing process is simple – though downloading the chosen products. In order to make things even more customer-oriented, you can also find a list of the best and latest deals available on the different internet sites this tool is browsing.
The second designer tip I'd really like to share is related to a Freepik tool, called CSS Matic, which allows you to create different Gradients and Frames, beautiful Drop Shadows and Noise Textures. The Gradient generator especially is very useful as it enables the creation of gradients either from scratch or from given samples. And since this was only possible thorough tools like Photoshop, and some level of skill, this makes it a lot more user-friendly.
In case you are a skilled web developer, CSS Matic is always looking for collaborators in order to make this non-profit project as best and as easy to use as possible.
All in all, both Freepik and CSS Matic are prime examples of a niche being catered to exclusively. While because of their sheer numbers web designers wouldn't fall under the definition of the term ‘niche', their tools of the trade are ever so important as to be specific to them alone. This is why getting free resources as well as free CSS tools from the same people is important: it's a time saver and a familiar environment to return to that they provide. And why not, maybe help them out in return by contributing to the project?
Below, a few examples of the resources available on Freepik.com:
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