So Where Do YOU Get Your High Quality Graphics From?
Lets face it, if you want to design an attractive looking website or a blog, your icons, images and pretty much anything containing graphics in your site, must be of the highest quality possible. I prefer when images look close to HD (High Definition). By that I mean they have to be very clear, sharp and non pixelated which gives a good impression to your readers.
Take for example these three images, they are high quality images to the popular social networks: YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter and as you can see they look very attractive, on top of that their usage license states: (Free For Commercial Use). 🙂
The problem is that to acquire high quality graphics nowadays, you'd have to pay real currency for it. It's not expensive, but it's not an ideal way for people who are just starting out online and haven't made any income yet to be spending their money on high quality graphics.
What I'm going to show you next is a list of services that I use to get my high quality media from and it's absolutely free (you just have to be a little careful because some of the items are licensed under “Creative Commons” and to use them you might have to leave a link back to the author, but most of them you can use absolutely free (licensed under: Free For Commercial Use), so just make sure you read the item's license description.
Some of the services below let you download full images and icons for free and some let you create your very own and also free.
IconFinder.com (High Quality Icons)
- This is my favorite site, I get all my icons from there, they have a wide range of high quality icons. This site launched back in 2007 and it was the first search engine to focus on nothing else but icons.
- Today they provide site/blog owners with high quality icons that they can download and use for free.
- The best part about using this service is that you can specify the size of the icons you wish to download, and if you go high enough, you can find icons as big as normal images that you can use as full high quality images.
- They also provide most of their icons in “PNG” or “ICO” formats. So you can use Transparent images (PNG) and blend it in with the rest of your website's theme/look.
SoftIcons.com (High Quality Graphics And Icons)
- SoftIcons.com allows you to download individual or icon sets for free (mainly for personal use but thousands of icons there are available for commercial use as well, just make sure to read each item's usage description).
- As of writing this article, SoftIcons database contains 307,102 icons/images in 1,772 sets. A lot of authors submit their icons and images to SoftIcons for fun or to get more exposure and traffic to their website, since each author gets their own profile page with a “DOFOLLOW” link back to their website.
FavIcon.cc (Free Icons Creator)
- Favicons (favorite icons) are the small images that you see in the address bar to the left of your website's address. They will be displayed on browser tabs, and in the bookmark list as well.
- Getting a Favicon now is easy and simple with Favicon.cc. If you don't find one that has already been created and published on favicon.cc under the Creative Commons license, you can create one yourself and use it absolutely free.
- They allow you to create each pixel which gives you total control to the overall look of the image.
CoolText.com (My Ultimate Source For Logos, Banner, Buttons and Fonts)
- This site offers a free graphics generator, it has a wide range of categories and you can create almost anything you can think of putting into your website, using CoolText.com alone.
- They have a premade selection of logos, banners, buttons and even cool looking fonts that you can download and install on your system to use on your websites.
- They make it very easy to customize any of their already made selections with an easy form that contains options that you can change yourself and see the change done on the fly, so you can play around with it till you get it to look the way you like.
- If you are the creative type, I highly recommend using CoolText.com to create your own selections and styles.
Above are my top 4 sources for getting high quality images, banners, icons, logos…etc.
If you know of any other similar services available and would like to recommend it, please share it with us in the comments below. 🙂