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Recommended Design Resources by Thrive Themes

Recommended Design Resources

Everything You Need to Create Better, Conversion Focused Designs

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Recommended Design Resources by Thrive Themes

Free Images Finding images you can use for your website can be tricky because you have to

make sure that you not only find a fitting image but also have the rights to use

it.

Here are some great sources for 100% free to use (including for commercial

purposes) images for your site. Please note that policies can change over time,

so always double-check to make sure you have the appropriate rights for any

image before publishing it.

Pixabay

Pixabay is a great place to search through thousands of images available for

commercial use. You’ll find some high-quality shots for almost any keyword

you can think of.

Pexels

Pexels is a searchable database of free images, very similar to Pixabay. The

collection is smaller (at the time of this writing), but the quality standard is

high.

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Recommended Design Resources by Thrive Themes

PicJumbo

Most of the images on PicJumbo are created by the site’s owner. The collection

is fairly small, but all the pictures are very high quality.

Unsplash

On unsplash, you’ll find 10 new free pics posted every 10 days. They are

usually landscape photographs often in subdued tones, which makes them

good as background images.

Creative Commons Search

This is a search engine you can use to find images and you can set the filter to

only look for images that have a free, commercial use license. You can use it to

find suitable images via Google, flickr and other sources. Note that the filtering

doesn’t always work perfectly and it’s important to double-check the licenses

of anything you find here.

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Recommended Design Resources by Thrive Themes

Free Icons Photographs can be very useful, but depending on what you’re writing about,

they aren’t always ideal. Sometimes, icons and simpler graphics are more

useful as illustrations to go along with text. Here are some of my favourite

sources:

IcoMoon

IcoMoon lets you pick from dozens of font icon sets (many, but not all of them

free to use) and generate your own custom icon sets that you can use both

online and off.

We like IcoMoon so much that we’ve integrated our products with it, so you

can use your custom icon sets directly in Thrive Themes, Thrive Content Builder

etc.

FontAwesome

FontAwesome is a hugely popular icon font with icons for almost any purpose

you can think of. You can download it directly, but we recommend simply

loading FontAwesome into IcoMoon and generating your custom sets that

way.

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Recommended Design Resources by Thrive Themes

IconFinder

IconFinder is an icon search engine that you can use to find image icons. It has

useful filter settings that let you search for icons that are free to use for

commercial purposes.

Image Editors What to use when you want to tweak an image or create a custom featured

image or social media image? Here are some free image editors worth

checking out:

Canva

Canva is perhaps the most user friendly image editor anywhere. It’s super easy

to create images for various purposes and you can even use pre-defined

templates for Twitter cover images, Facebook ad images and many more.

Check out this video we made about it.

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Recommended Design Resources by Thrive Themes

PicMonkey

PicMonkey is an online image editing tool that is a bit more advanced than

Canva. On the flip side, it also has more of a learning curve and is a bit more

time consuming to use.

Pixlr

Pixlr is another step up in terms of complexity, offering even more features

and options, but also requiring more learning time.

Fonts Fonts are a very important design element on any web page. Where can you

get good fonts?

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Recommended Design Resources by Thrive Themes

Google Fonts

There are countless sources of fonts online, but there’s no real need to look

any further than Google Fonts, unless you’re a total typography junkie. Fonts

are nothing to mess with, so we always recommend sticking to the more

popular and less fancy ones.

FontPair

Combining fonts is tricky. Unless you’re a typography nerd yourself, it’s best to

“outsource” this kind of decision and FontPair is one of the places where you

can find pre-created font pairings that look good.

Beautiful Web Type

Another great source of inspiration when it comes to Google Font pairings.

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Recommended Design Resources by Thrive Themes

Design Inspiration Sometimes, the key to good design is to “steal like an artist” and find some

great designs, color combinations and layouts you can use as inspiration for

your own site. Here are some great sources:

Note & Point

A showcase of beautifully designed slideshow presentations. Great for creating

your own presentations and also a great source of basic design styles and color

combinations.

Dribbble

A vast and growing collection of design examples, usually on the cutting edge

of what’s cool right now.

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Recommended Design Resources by Thrive Themes

SiteInspire

A pure web design showcase. The designs are all very cool and slick, but be

warned: sites presented in showcases like this are usually too cool for their

own good. These are websites that look great but not websites that convert.

Take elements from these designs, but stay away from copying them overall.

Other Here are some other useful links that don’t fit into the categories above:

AwesomeScreenshot

AwesomeScreenshot is a very handy browser extension for taking screenshots

of websites and annotating them. Very useful for saving designs you like and

communicating with others about design work.

Jing

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Recommended Design Resources by Thrive Themes

Jing is also a screen capture tool, but it’s not tied to your browser. So, for any

screenshot outside of the browser, this is the one to use. Also makes it easy to

annotate and share images.

PSD Covers

A huge collection of Photoshop actions you can use to render ebook cover

graphics and other “cover shots” of various formats.

VideoHive

VideoHive is a marketplace, so the stuff you find here is not free. However, if

you do video work, this is a great place for finding pre-designed assets to add a

professional touch to your videos (e.g. intro strings, lower thirds etc.).

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Recommended Design Resources by Thrive Themes

Thank You! Thank you for downloading our design resources guide! We hope you find this

useful. And remember: if you want to make sure your sites and landing pages

come pre-vetted by design professionals and conversion experts, Thrive

Themes has got you covered.

Check out Our Conversion Focused

Products Here!