The 10 best places to find free vector art online

You know that feeling when a piece of work isn’t coming together and you need to test out lots of ideas but can’t risk the extra time drawing something from scratch? So you decide to search for some free vector art online - but it's not always easy to find what you're looking for.

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A good free selection of vector art can be a lifesaver for any designer. But more often than not, the process of finding what you need amidst cluttered, confusing pages just adds to the mounting deadline stress. To help you avoid that experience, we've put together a hand-picked guide to the best free vector art resources, including various useful designs that you can download in preparation for future projects. Please note and respect the Creative Commons licence if there is one.

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01. All Silhouettes

Despite being heavy on adverts, All Silhouettes trumps many other free vector websites in that everything is clearly labelled, fairly quick to navigate and the vast selection is available as bumper vector packs rather than single images.

02. Snap2objects

A nice clean site with lots of great free vector art. The blog-style layout is a bit time consuming to browse but you can find a lot of gems include excellent city vector shapes for New York, Paris, London, Moscow and Tokyo.

03. Fudgegraphics

Fudgegraphics is a creative blog run by designer Franz Jeitz so it doesn’t have a huge selection of freebies like vector stock sites. However, everything here is made to a high quality including one of the best free splatter vector files available online, so it's definitely worth including in your search for free vector art.

04. DaFont

Dingbat Fonts are essentially a collection of small vector illustrations. Simply type the letter you need and “Create Outlines” in Illustrator CS6 to turn it into an object. Not all fonts are free for commercial use, so check the right filters before searching.

05. Fontspace.com

Font websites are generally more user-friendly and pleasant to browse than ad-laden vector homepages. Fontspace in particular has a great user experience where you can see whether a font is free for commercial use simply by moving your mouse over it.

06. Brands of the World

Brands of the World is an invaluable timesaver if you’re designing for corporate clients and don’t want to sit around waiting for someone to forward you a hi-res version of a certain logo. You can just find it here.

07. Spoongraphics

This personal blog belonging to designer Chris Spooner features a large number of well-made, original freebies. Come for the free vector art, stay for the excellent and insightful articles!

08. Vecteezy

Popular site Vecteezy is a one-stop shop for finding any free vector art that you’re thinking of. However the quality does vary, so you may have to spend time wading through mediocre vectors before finding something that is good enough to use. It's worth the time, though, because there are some quality vector graphics to be found here.

09. DesignContest

DesignContest is more of a commission site and extremely tricky to navigate if you’re just looking for free vector art. However, it does offer a well-designed free T-shirt template and various other free icons on the lower right menu.

10. Free Vector Archive

A big stock vector site with very efficient browsing options. You can search by colour, theme, popularity or file extension. It’s clean to navigate and free from distracting ads - all in all, a superb place to search for free vector art.

Joanna Zhou is an award-winning manga illustrator and graphic designer. She currently runs her own design label Maqaroon.

• Have you found a good resource for free vector art? Please let us know about it in the comments!