Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you where to find
free design resources. And this list is actually for non graphic designers. So I'm also going to
be showing you how to use them. Now, if you are a graphic designer, I have another list
and it should be right up here at the top of your screen. So just click that link,
and it'll take you to that video. All right, let's get started. First, we'll look at color schemes.
My favorite site for this is color.adobe.com. To get to the nicest color schemes, in my opinion,
I first go to the Explore tab right up here. And then over here on the middle right,
I'll choose View>Color Themes and >Most Popular, and then we can scroll through hundreds of really
great color palettes. And you can use these for a blog or a logo you're trying to create.
So let's click on one. And when we hover over each color, you can see that the text changes to Copy.
So if you copy this, this is copying that color code right here. And you can use that color code
on a blog or other website. If you come over here, you have even more options. We can download as
a JPEG. And we can even copy the CSS. When you do that, all it does is copy to your clipboard.
So you would want to open Dreamweaver or another CSS editor and then paste that in. I'm going to
go back to color.adobe.com. I want to show you how to create your own color palettes.
You can do that right here under Create, which is where it takes you at the beginning. And we start
off with Analogous over here. And that's just a color harmony. So if we pull one of these,
it'll give us the analogous colors for that. If we want monochromatic, we can just click here. And we
have lots of other options here. But we can go completely custom too. Usually when I do this,
I make sure to click something that has a few more colors than just two. So something like
analogous to start out with. Then I click Custom. And then I can just drag these anywhere I want.
Now this is kind of fun, but honestly it is hard to get a good looking color palette by doing this.
It's best to just start with one of these and then drag it around and find one you like.
For example, these colors just don't look that great together. So this is where I always go for
colors. Next I'll show you some good sites for templates for social media posts. And the first
place I'm going to go for this is Pixlr PIXLR.com. Now this site has a lot of really awesome tools.
For social media posts, we're going to go here to PIXLR X. Templates are actually new to Pixlr. They
just came out this year. So I'm going to choose View More here on recommended templates. And we
can just choose any of these. I'll choose this bike one, and then I'll choose Use This Template.
And now we get a lot of different options over here. When we hover, we can see that they do
different things, layout and template, add text, add element. We've got a lot of different options.
So if I hover over here, I can just double click. I can just start typing something new. And then I
can hit CMD A or CTRL A to select all of that text. And we can change the fill color here.
Now we have a lot of other options. We can change the font, we can decrease the transparency,
and we can increase or decrease the size and adjust the leading right here. Now each part
of this is editable. Sometimes you'll need to double click to get inside it.
You can also change your picture. So if we come down here to Add Image,
we can go to Browse and then just grab something on our computer.
And then it'll place it in that same area. We can just position it however we want.
And now you'll probably notice that this text does not look very good on
here. So we'll probably want to go with something darker.
That looks nice. Now this site will have ads on it. So to get rid of those you have to
pay for premium. So I'll just X out of that. I'm going to go ahead and change the colors.
I'll click on this red one and get my little eyedropper right here,
and then click on this color. I'll do the same down here.
So I think we're ready to save this. So I'll come right down here to the bottom right and click
Save. And I want this to be a JPEG quality at 100. And the image width and height are fine. And I'll
download. So now I've got a JPEG that I can upload to any of my social media channels. Now so far
the templates on this site are kind of minimal. Now this site Pixlr also has a couple of other
tools that are really handy. It also has Pixlr E which is the advanced photo editor. It's kind of
like Photoshop, but it's free. And then there's a background remover, and we'll talk about that tool
here in a minute. The second place we're going to go for social media post templates, is canva.com.
So this is spelled like canvas, but without the S. Now this one you'll have to have an account for,
but that's free. So I'm logged in right now, and I can just choose what type of image I want to
create. Let's go to Social Media. And then it gives us even more options. I'm gonna go
with Instagram post, so I'll click that one. And over here, we have a lot of different categories
of templates. Here are some that focus on the Coronavirus. Here's some newsroom style ones,
animated ones, and then a few different other types. So let's try one of these animated ones.
I'm going to click on this. Also, when you hover over them, it'll tell you if it's free or not. So
I'm going to try this one. And now the process is the same. You just hover over something that you
want to select, and you can click on it, you can double click and highlight parts of the text that
you want to change. With Canva, everything is in a different place. So up here is where your text
color is. You can change your size here. Let's put this at 50. And we'll put this at 50 also.
I can resize right over here, change my textbox and rotate right down here if I want to.
Now this is an animated cat, so we can replace this with a static image, or find another animated
image and replace it. But we can also move this cat around if we want to. We can just click and
drag to reposition everything. And we can just click once on the background to change colors.
Those are right up here. So I'm going to change this to a teal color and maybe a darker blue
like this. Now we do have some options when we click on the cat. You can see he has spots
and some yellow highlights. I'm going to change his spots to that teal color that we just used.
And then when we're ready, we can download right here. And it will give us a suggested file type.
Right now it's suggesting an mp4 video. So we'll download this. And it'll take some time. And then
once it's done, you can just go to your Instagram and upload it as a post. Ok, I'm going to show you
another example, and this one is going to be a Twitter post. So I'll just click that one.
And then we have a lot of different options over here. Ok, so I'm going to choose this 50% off
sale. So now we can hover to see what's editable. And we can double click to change our text. Then
if we come over here to the left, we can start changing things out so we can go to Uploads and
upload our own image here. We can get it from our device or a few other places. Let's look at
their photos. I'm going to search for flowers. Ok, this one's free, so I'm going to click that one.
And I'm going to get on a corner to enlarge this to the full size of the canvas. I'll click Flip
and then Flip horizontal so that the flower is on the right side. And then I'm going to
change the color of my text. I'm going to click this photo and delete. I'll move this down here.
And I think I want to change the color on that. So the colors for these graphics are right here.
I think I'll choose kind of a dark pink color, maybe a little lighter.
That looks good. And then I'll just delete this one. I'm going to add Mother's Day here. So
I'll just click after the F and hit Return or Enter. And then I'll type Mother's Day.
Now this will need to be quite a bit smaller. So I'm going to highlight that part of the text.
I'll make it 60. And I think I'll change this to this same color over here. So we'll get up here
to the text color, and then choose that one. And this needs to be darker, it's very hard
to see. So I'll use this color. We'll make it a little bit bigger too, by dragging on a corner.
I'm going to move all of this down because it's kind of competing with all that stuff up there.
But I think we're ready to save. So I have a few different options. I can publish it
straight to Twitter. If I click this, I'm going to have to connect it to my Twitter account.
And I don't really want to do that. So instead, I'm just going to click on this arrow to download.
And we have a few different file type options. It suggests PNG so that's what we're going to
do. So we'll download, and when we do this, it'll go straight into your downloads folder.
So on Chrome, it comes right down here. And then I can click the little caret and choose
Show in Finder. And here is our image. Now we can go out to Twitter, and click on the
image and then navigate to the downloads which will probably be over here if you're on a PC,
and that's it. We can open it, and then we can add some text to our post, and then tweet. So
it's that easy to customize a template inside of Canva. It's a really great resource. Remove
the background of a photo. Ok, so for this, we'll go back to pixlr.com. I'm going to open an image.
This one is from Vecteezy. And it's saying it's pretty big. But that's ok. And here's the result.
It's taken out all of the background, but it also took out the stomach. So we'll need to come over
here to FINE-TUNE. I'm going to change the mode to Keep and then I'm going to increase my size,
maybe a little more even. And we can just draw this part back in here.
So it did a pretty good job about cutting out the background. Now there's a part right up
here at the top, that doesn't look quite right. But anyway, you can really fine tune with these
tools over here, maybe get your size really small and reduce your softness, so you can get right
in there in those little areas. But once it's all ready to go, you can just download and Download's
right down here on Chrome. And I'm just going to click this little caret and choose Show in Finder.
And then if I hit my spacebar on a Mac, I can preview it. And you can see it doesn't have
a background. So this right here was what I was talking about. So you can fine tune all that out.
The next free resource is Google fonts. So I'm just going to type that into the search bar. And
it should be the first thing that pops up in Google. Now all of these fonts are free
for personal and commercial use. So if you scroll through, and you find one that you like... I'm
liking Anton. So I'm going to click that. And then right up here, we can download the family.
I'll click that. And then if you're on Google Chrome, it'll come down here to that same
place. So it'll go into your downloads folder, and then I'll click the caret and Show in Finder.
Then it'll be a ZIP file, so if you're on a Mac, all you have to do is double click this.
If you're on a PC, you can right click and choose Extract or Extract All,
and then you'll get a folder like this. Then you just double click this on a Mac,
you'll just be asked if you want to install the font. And I'll go ahead and do that. On a PC,
you'll just right click and choose Install Font or something like that.
But you want the file that ends in TTF or OTF. But anyway, once it's installed, you can use it on any
program that supports text like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop,
anything where you can type into the program. Another great site for fonts is Font Squirrel.
All of these sites will be linked in my description below. Now all these fonts on Font
Squirrel are available to use free for commercial use and personal use, of course. So that means you
can make something with these fonts and sell them. When I click in I can see what the font
looks like. And then I can click Download from Font Spring. And here are the two free versions
of this font. We would click Purchase Font here. And then we could add them and then View Cart,
and then check out for $0. So Font Squirrel will usually take you to a different site to download
the fonts. And that's actually a good thing because then you can really verify that they're
free. A lot of different sites that are kind of like this will have a lot of stolen fonts.
So that is Font Squirrel. So both Google Fonts and Font Squirrel are great for free,
personal and commercial use fonts. Ok, next up is free photos. The first site I love for free photos
is unsplash.com. If you scroll down, you can just browse free photos that are available. Or if you
need something specific, you can just search for it. So let's look for a businessman. And we get
a few different business scenes. All of these photos are free for personal and commercial use.
And you don't have to mention the photographer when you use it, although it's definitely a
nice thing to do that. So if we wanted to use this one, I'll just click on it and then Download free,
and it goes right into my downloads. We can also click on this caret and choose what size we want.
Now Pexels.com is another site just like this that has free photos and videos for personal
and commercial use. So I'm going to type in 'running' and here are all the really nice
high quality images you can have for free. This site is like Unsplash. You don't have to credit
the photographer, but it's much appreciated if you do. We can also look at videos here. If you hover
you can see what the video looks like. And these are also free to download and include on your blog
or for commercial purposes, but you can't sell the video or photo itself. When they say commercial
use, they mean to use it as part of a video maybe a YouTube video or something like that. The next
cool site I'm going to show you actually uses the Unsplash photo library and creates duotones out
of them. And it's called Duotone Shape Factory. Now with this site, you can use Unsplash photos,
and then choose what colors you want the duotone to be, and this way you can match your branding.
So for this first color, I'm going to choose kind of an orange. And for the second color, I'm going
to go with kind of a yellowish color. Then I can search for a photo. Let's look for food photos.
And then I could download any of these for free and use them in my blog. So to download I would
just click and then Download right here. And it would go straight into my downloads.
Mockups. For free mockups, the best place that I know of is Placeit.net. Now this site is also
freemium. So they have a lot of free images you can use. But to use a lot of the images
you have to pay. Placeit requires an account, so you'll need to create one to edit the images.
But that's free too. And if you go up here to Mockups>Highlights, you can see freebies
right at the very top. Then we can look over here for templates. So there's three-quarter
sleeve tees here. And these are the free ones that you can use. And these actually change. So
if you visit the site in a month, they might be different. So let's customize this. Here, we can
Add Text. We can actually upload our own design, and they tell you what size to make that design.
And then you can change your shirt color here and your sleeve color here. And once you have
it all set up the way you like it, then you can go to Free Download. So let's go ahead and upload
an image from our device. I'll just put my logo on here. I'm going to move it up a little bit.
And then crop. Ok, that looks fine. And then I'll make my sleeves probably this orange color
to match. And then we'll come up here to Free Download, and it has no watermark, and it's a
high resolution one. So we'll download that. It takes a moment to process your mock up. And
once it's processed, you can click to download it. And it'll go into your downloads. Editing Photos.
For photo editing, you can use GIMP. This is a free image editor. And it's one that you actually
have to download onto your system as a program. So here's the download button. And honestly, this
does have a bit of a learning curve. But there are lots of YouTube tutorials available for it. So I'm
not going to go over how to use it in this video, but it is a very powerful program like Photoshop.
Illustrations. For illustrations, I like unDraw.co. Then I'll come over here to Browse
now. So all of these images are free for personal or commercial use. And if we click on one,
we can just come over here to download the SVG. You also have the option of downloading a PNG,
if that's all you need. So you can use this for your blog posts or whatever you need.
And here's the image in my Downloads folder. Now the cool thing about this is you also have the
option of changing the color to match your brand. So I can click right up here and enter a hex code.
Or I can just choose a color here, and it will update those SVG files. And after you do that,
you can just download the PNG that matches your brand. Charts. For charts, I like chartgo.com.
So you can make charts like this really easily here. So if we start here, we can enter everything
about the graph that we want. So let's have some grid lines. And we'll make it transparent,
and I want round corners, and then we can create the chart. We can also change our chart type.
This one isn't looking very good with the transparency,
so I'm going to use the bar chart. And now we have a lot of different options for downloading.
I'll choose Download image, and then it goes straight into my downloads folder. And here's
what it looks like. I can just upload this onto my blog or wherever I needed to go. And that is my
list of free graphic design resources. All right, if you liked this video and you want to see more
videos like it, just hit the subscribe button and the little bell next to it and you'll be notified
every time a new video comes out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!