Creative Resources

8-bit chiptune music tracker.

Palette generator and library with direct Creative Cloud export, plus a large community-submitted library.

Professional creative suite for design and photo editing, free alternative to Illustrator & InDesign, with Canva AI integration.

PBR materials, more focused purely on textures than Poly Haven.

Universal gradient generator with OKLCH & Display-P3 support.

Free knowledge management tool.

Algorithm-free platform for curating and sharing ideas.

Pixel-art editor. Buy a one-time key to support the developer, or build the source yourself for free.

Audio recording & editing software.

Adobe's portfolio platform, full project case studies across every design discipline.

3D software at its core, but its node-based compositor and Grease Pencil tools make it a genuinely usable free alternative to After Effects for motion graphics.

3D modeler for creating voxel art, suitable for Minecraft models.

Archive of real brand guideline documents pulled from actual companies.

Privacy-focused web browser, blocks ads and trackers by default.

French collective distributing inclusive, non-binary and post-binary typefaces.

Free, open-source vector editor, similar to Inkscape.

Simple and fast design tool with a vast library of templates and assets.

Procedural retro sound effect generator.

Open-source, collectively designed contemporary Italian typefaces.

All-in-one color tool, shades, tints, RGB/CMYK percentages, and ready-to-copy CSS for backgrounds, text, borders, and shadows.

Curated collection of color palettes, with a focus on modern and trendy color combinations.

AI palette generator trained on photography, film, and art datasets, lock in a color and it fills in the rest, or pull a palette straight from an uploaded image.

Browser-based no-code 2D engine, drag-and-drop event sheets, free tier caps events and layers, full access needs a subscription.

Fast color palette generator, with a large library of user-submitted palettes.

Visual moodboarding tool, built around a searchable image grid with a color-based search tool.

Closed-source video editor, similar to Adobe Premiere.

Serves common libraries (jQuery, etc.) locally instead of fetching them from third-party CDNs, blocking a common tracking vector without breaking sites that depend on those CDNs.

Lightweight 2D-focused engine built by King, Lua scripting, tiny builds, strong for mobile.

Strips Google's click-tracking redirect wrapper from Search and Maps links, so clicking or copying a result gives you the real URL directly.

Palette preview software, with gradient studies across shape, backdrop, and colour.

Privacy and freedom first web browser, faster and lighter engine than chromium browsers.

Mostly paid vector content, but they have a free high-quality collection of icons, including monochrome brand icons.

Free, open-source editor for building or modifying typefaces at the point/curve level.

Archive of typefaces spotted in real design work, searchable by font or by industry.

Curated free fonts from Indian Type Foundry, generally more polished than most free libraries.

Free sound effects for all situations, searchable by category.

Collaborative collection of sound effects and field recordings, searchable by license type.

2D-focused engine with drag-and-drop plus its own GML scripting language, behind Undertale, Hotline Miami, and Hyper Light Drifter.

No-code, event-based 2D engine, a gentler starting point than Godot or GameMaker if you'd rather not write code yet.

Free, open-source raster editor, similar to Photoshop.

Vector animation tool built around the Lottie format, closer to a free After Effects plus Bodymovin workflow than to Adobe Animate.

Free general-purpose engine for 2D and 3D, node-based scene system, scriptable in GDScript or C#, closest free alternative to Unity.

Slides, Docs, and Sheets are nice alternatives to Microsoft Office.

Free, open-source web font library, huge but hit-or-miss on quality, also hosts Material Symbols, a solid icon set.

Early-stage open-source vector editor, node-based and non-destructive.

Color palette generator with templates to visualize color combinations in real use-cases.

Free, open-source vector editor, similar to Illustrator.

Video editor, similar to Adobe Premiere.

Over 30,000 game assets (sprites, UI, audio, fonts), about as close to a default starting point as free game asset libraries get.

Free, open-source raster editor, focused on digital painting and illustration.

Entity-driven level editor from the Dead Cells designer, complements Tiled rather than replacing it, better suited to placed objects than large tile grids.

Office suite.

Fork of Aseprite. Less advanced but excellent if you're looking for a more straightforward alternative.

Digital audio workstation.

Another free, open-source knowledge management tool, self-hostable.

Lightweight 2D game framework built around Lua, code-only with no built-in editor, popular for jams and small prototypes thanks to its minimal learning curve.

Turns a single image into normal, height, and AO maps for PBR materials.

Layered PSD mockups organized by category, packaging, business cards, apparel, outdoor signage, more realistic than generic template packs.

Collection of items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections.

Brussels-based collective building libre fonts and tools, DIY and workshop-driven.

Community-submitted game art and audio, check each asset's license individually since it isn't uniformly CC0 like Kenney.

Free 2D framework for browser games, worth a look if you want a link-and-play web build instead of a native install.

Photoshop alternative, opens PSD and other native formats.

The default moodboard tool, deep library but mid algorithm and ad-driven.

Mainly for 3D work but they offer a wide range of textures that can be used for other purposes.

From the EFF, learns to block invisible trackers automatically based on their behavior rather than relying on a manual filter list.

Hand-picked collection of out-of-copyright works.

Lightweight reference board, keeps pinned images on top of other windows.

Free, open-source RAW photo processor.

Minimalist, ad-free image curation, another alternative to Pinterest, similar to Cosmos.

Google's photo editing app, known for its powerful yet easy-to-use tools.

A wide range of high-quality textures, leaning grunge, paper, and print-decay, photographic overlays rather than the PBR materials Poly Haven and Ambient CG use.

One of the first free, open-source web font foundries, small library but well-crafted.

One of the larger free brand-logo SVG libraries, multiple variants per brand (color, mono, light, dark, wordmark), no attribution required.

Engine-agnostic tile map editor, worth having regardless of which engine you land on for room-based or tile-based level design.

Collection of textures with css presets.

Real-time 3D visualization software powered by Unreal Engine.

Content blocker, efficient and highly configurable. Chrome only gets uBlock Origin Lite since Google pulled the full version after the Manifest V3 switch, noticeably weaker filtering than the Firefox version.

Closed-source industry-standard engine for 2D and 3D, C# scripting, huge asset store and community.

Stock images and vector assets/templates, free tier is limited but worth digging through.

Illustrator alternative from the same developer as Photopea, opens AI, SVG and PDF files.

French, community-run foundry, leans experimental and multilingual.

Types your text out across every font installed on your system at once, for quick comparison.

AI-powered office suite, available on all platforms.

Based on Firefox, workflow might seem a bit odd at first but once you get the hang of it, you don't go back from it (DRM support is broken on windows).