Image Is Everything
You find yourself on a tight deadline you were not expecting. One of the deliverables for the project is gathering downloadable stock graphics. Where do you go?
It can be really frustrating when you have a great concept for adding illustration or art to a project but don't have the budget to commission an illustrator. There are several ways to handle this: you could create the artwork yourself, try and negotiate more money for the project, or, you could use a stock art website. Online stock art websites now feature a huge and eclectic variety of illustrations in various styles and sizes, created by thousands of talented illustrators.
Below is a list of some of the best sites for you to check out.
For professional graphic designers using Adobe’s Creative Cloud, Adobe Stock might be the perfect solution. The platform integrates with all Creative Cloud apps such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. It gives you the opportunity to preview a stock graphic before acquiring the license. Packed with high-quality photography, vectors and illustration, it's also a great platform for selling your own artwork. If you want to give it a test drive, Adobe offers a free 30-day trial
iStock by Getty Images is another big platform offering millions of premium images, illustrations, vectors, videos, and audio tracks. Just like Getty Images itself, it has nice options such as filtering content by colors, categories, etc. You can also install iStock’s official app for iOS and Android to download the latest stock graphics wherever you are. iStock's illustrations are a little more vector-based than most on this list. But its range is extensive and relatively inexpensive.
On Shutterstock, you can browse through more than 300 million royalty-free stock footage including a vast amount of images, vector graphics, illustrations, videos, and even music titles. Although you might think of it as a photography library, Shutterstock features a vast amount of stock art among its ever-expanding collection of imagery. Whether you're after sleek vectors, eye-catching illustrations or simple clip art, you should easily be able to find what you're looking for on the easy-to-navigate site.
During the past years, Creative Market became extremely popular among graphic designers from around the globe. They offer a wide range of templates, fonts, graphics, web themes, mock-ups, presentations, stock photos, and add-ons that have been created by almost 30k designers and studios. Most of the items are available for a very low budget
Envato Elements works quite different compared to the websites before. After purchasing a monthly or yearly subscription, you get access to a huge amount of stock graphics. This way, you can download as many products as you want. This solution is definitely something for the power users, which have a high demand for graphics, presentations, stock photos, design assets, fonts, videos, ebooks, website themes, and plugins.
Compared to the competitors mentioned before, YouWorkForThem is rather small but my thinking is they offer the most selective range of professional graphics including fonts and a nice variety of stock art. That said if you want to download your graphics from a smaller, independent platform, YouWorkForThem is definitely the right choice for you.
As the name suggests, MightyDeals is something for the bargain hunters among you. They offer time-limited deals in the form of bundles that can be downloaded for very little money.
Basically the same idea as MightyDeals, Pixelo is another website specializing in heavily discounted bundles of graphics, fonts, icons, logos, and other graphic stock items. The deals are limited in time and the price.