Top Illustration resources to level up your side project

In the last few years, more and more brands (e.g. Mailchimp, Dropbox, WeTransfer, and numerous more), tend to decorate their user experience with unique illustrations that add style and personality to their homepage, landing page, infographic, or any web page their visitors land on.

Illustrations have a magic attribute to make your user interface more playful and clear at the same time. It is easier to communicate your message and engage with your audience through a descriptive graphic instead of the standard stock photos.

As a designer/maker/developer, it could be tough to create your own custom illustration work. But that doesn’t mean your project has to lack in visual appeal.

That’s the reason why I curated the current list. Below I share a couple of fantastic resources, apps, and tools that help you create your own unique illustrations by customizing various parts or adopting some pre-defined art to your brand guidelines.

ITG Builder

Build your unique story in several clicks by ITG’s easy-to-use online builder.

You don’t need to install any applications to edit illustrations. You can do that online. More than 100,000 combinations are available for you.

Fresh Folk

FreshFolk is a free illustration library of a varied range of people and objects. They come with a bunch of different skin colors, clothing, positions, and clothing.

There’s also a variation of different background elements that you can mix to create a range of different settings, from an office-type setting to a nature walk, or a living space!

Open Peeps

Open Peeps is a hand-drawn illustration library to create scenes of people. You can use them in product illustration, marketing, comics, product states, user flows, personas, storyboarding, quinceañera invitations, or whatever you want!

The library works like building blocks made of vector arms, legs, and emotions. You can mix these elements to create different Peeps.

Absurd Design

What about absurd illustrations for your next project? Take every user on an individual journey through their own imagination with Absurd illustrations. This series of illustrations paradoxically combine absurdity and a deep sense of childishness and naivety.

ManyPixels Gallery

ManyPixels’ gallery offers a wide variety of free customizable illustrations. Discover your appropriate variation by searching your own term or custom tags to power up your project!

Use them in a commercial or non-commercial way for your landing pages, blog posts, email newsletters, social media graphics, and more!

PixelTrue Illustration pack

These free SVG illustrations and Lottie animations are available for free for personal and commercial use (MIT License). In other words: you can do whatever you want with them.

Provided by the amazing PixelTrue team, which provides high-quality illustrations for startups.

Ouch!

Ouch! helps creators who don’t draw overcome the lack of quality graphics. Download the free illustrations from top Dribbble artists to class up your product.

Ouch is a project of Icons8 dedicated to free vector illustrations for the user interface. They would give a clean, trendy look to your designs and class up your project.

unDraw

Create better-designed websites, products, and applications with unDraw library. Browse to find the images that fit your messaging, automagically customize the color to match your brand, and use it as a normal image, embedded code, or directly in your design workflow.

Quality illustrations are available for your designs with customizable color(s), objects that can be combined and modified to create new exciting images, and with a design style that balances art and tech to future-proof your designs.