(Find the current version of this post on http://blog.pexels.com/websites-every-designer-should-know/.)

This article lists different websites and tools designers should know and I use regularly during my daily work.

Photos

There are a lot of sources for free beautiful photos you can use everywhere without any copyright restrictions. But there is one website that collects all of them in one place. With the integrated search it is very easy to find pictures that you like. Check out pexels.com. It is an amazing website that should be in every bookmark list.

Inspiration

Depending on what I do I use different sources for inspiration. Dribbble is perfect for high quality designs and Line25 is awesome to get inspired by magnificent websites. And there is a site I visit when I’m bored: DesignBreak collects funny, inspiring and also interesting links you need to visit as a designer.

Typography

To sight beautiful typefaces you can also look at the sources from the point before. Even more inspiration for types are available on Typespiration. With this collection you will find well designed typefaces for almost every purpose. Another source is a website from Hellohappy. It is a showcase of the best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory.

Icons

There are a lot of sources for icons. One I check out all the time is Iconmonstr. They have a lot very simple icons. Another great source is Smashing Magazine. They have shared some packs with colorful and more detailed icons. To create icon fonts I recommend Fontastic. There you can choose from over 9,000 icons from different icon packs and upload your own icons from other sources.

Tools

Gimp is a good and free Photoshop alternative. I use it to edit photos and make them look better. If I design a website I use Inkscape to make the first prototype design. It is a very simple tool for sketches. If you are a Mac user and you need a more professional tool I recommend Sketch (but it is not for free).

Web Apps

My first web app tip for you is Flatuicolors. It is a collection of some nice colors that I use as a basis for every project. A more detailed color picker I like is Paletton. It is great to find color pairs that fit together.

Another amazing tool is Kraken.io. With it you can reduce the size of images. Either lossless or lossy but with a higher reduction. It is important every time I want to embedded a photo to a website, to reduce the load time.

Blogs

There are many blogs that publishes regularly nice articles. One of them is Smashing Magazine. This blog is not only about Design but with case studies and other interesting stuff it is a very good blog for designers and especially for web designers.

Another blog or more a publisher platform is Medium. Here you can read interesting articles from manifold authors. Design/UX is a collection of all design related articles here on Medium. And there are a lot more collections about this topic. Just use the search to find what you are interested in.

News(-letter)

I use several news websites to stay up to date and get informed if an awesome article is published on the web. One website that I visit almost every day is Designer News. I like the useful link tips and the inspirational discussions.

One newsletter that arrives in my inbox is Sidebar. With it I get useful links to great new resources and articles about design.

Which free tools do you recommend?

(Find the current version of this post on http://blog.pexels.com/websites-every-designer-should-know/.)