How to Get Free Print Designs
Have you been thinking about how to get started with print on demand or merch sales, and you’re stuck on what to use for designs? Then look no further, today we’ll tell you how to get free print designs.
For Most of These Free Design Sites, the Process Is Simple:
- Sign up for an account
- Download the image or graphic
There may at times be a third step, attribution. This step is only for some of the sites, but they require you to attribute free graphics to either the site or the original author of the design or photograph. Now, let’s get moving!
How to Get Free Print Designs?
The List:
- Printify – free t-shirt designs
- Freepik
- Pixabay
- Vecteezy
- Unsplash
- Death to Stock Photo
- Gratistography
- Morguefile
- Stockvault
- Pexels
- Picjumbo
- Pikwizard
Effortless Images and Graphics
Freepik
Freepik.com has thousands of resources, from business use to cars, animals and nature graphics, there are hundreds of thousands to choose from. If you’re operating on their free plan, you can use any one of their graphics, including on digital products, for free. The only caveat: you have to attribute them, including in physical products. This might work for some designs, especially for children or for events. If you take their premium option, then you’ll have access to all of their designs, not just their free print designs.
Pixabay
Pixabay is a huge, free stock photo service that offers stunning, user-generated content that covers just about every area of every aesthetic for free print designs. They have amazing photo images of mountains, waterfalls, and even illustrations. With over 1 million images, there’s something there for every customer and every merch store, take a look and get inspired to design!
Vecteezy
Vecteexy is another great service that offers a freemium mode for free print designs. Most of their millions of images are free to use for any of your projects, depending on the license. They also have a pro subscription that allows you to download premium designs from their contributor community. Whether you’re looking for that easy tee design for your slogan, or something stunning, Vecteezy and its contributors have you covered!
Unsplash
Unsplash is full of great, attribution free images from photographers all over the world. These are typically landscape or portrait images that photographers submit because they are proud of their subjects. Although the selection is limited, you’re able to use their creative commons license for any of your free print design projects. Start browsing now to get some beautiful images and inspiration for your next project.
Death to Stock Photo
Death to Stock Photo is the well-known email service that puts “non-Stocky”, stock photos into your email inbox. Carefully curated, these photos don’t have that “stock photo” feel of cheesy corporate hamming to the camera that comes with so many stock photos. Sign up and start getting some great designs into your inbox for use in your merch products, you may just turn free into profitable with these great options.
Gratisography
Gratisography has great, always free creative photos for nearly unlimited uses. They’re all completely free to download, without any copyright restrictions. As they say, you can do almost anything you can think of with these images and designs. They have quicky, eccentric and stunning photos of unique subjects, all at your disposal for use on your next merch project!
Morguefile
Billing itself as free images for creatives, by creatives, Morguefile has over 350,000 images to choose from. These are generally stunning, landscape or nature photos but also include photos with portraits or everyday, domestic life, and culture. If you’re looking for some unique perspectives on some of the world’s most beautiful scenery, check this site out for all of their images for free print designs to use on your projects.
Stockvault
Stockvault has over 1 million royalty-free images, neatly organized in collections for your convenience. These are stock photos that are used for websites or for posters and print, but you can definitely find some free print designs with graphics or photos that are suitable for your next project as well. Take a look and explore the wide range of images that are available here, you won’t be disappointed!
Pexels
All photos on Pexels can be used for free, including for free print designs. The only restriction is that you have to modify the image if you’re going to use it on a physical product and add value – you can’t just sell only the image or graphic, which is fair! So, if you’re going to modify the images or graphics for your own use anyway, then you can enjoy a wide variety of images from Pexels! Take a look at what they have available and see if there’s anything that inspires you!
Picjumbo
Picjumbo is another freemium photo service that offers great free and paid collections of photos. With hundreds of thousands of photos, it’s another great resource for free print designs, but especially good for categories such as food or home. If you’re making a brand that requires some pictures of hot chili peppers – or even making a snarky image with them – this is the place to start for some colorful, powerful images!
Pikwizard
PikWizard is another popular site that has stock images that would be good for American flag tees to babies and cats! Luckily for you, if you’re doing merch or even just web design, they have a huge community of users that eagerly upvote the best images on the platform – that way you’re not wasting time sifting through a ton of images of that same boring fruit bowl. Get started with PikWizard and enjoy the hundreds of thousands of images on their platform for your free print designs, all royalty-free, and with no attribution required.
Free Print Design Tools
Canva
Canva is a freemium online photo editing and design tool that allows you to use thousands of templates to edit and create fantastic free print designs. It’s also good for every day, non-graphics designers to make some images, graphics, and even books on the cheap. If you’ve got some free print designs that don’t require a lot of skill to make, this might be the tool to get them done for free. Their huge templates library is also extremely useful for the part-time, amateur Picasso in you, so have a look at their library and get designing!
BeFunky
BeFunky is a cool editor for Instagram obsessed. BeFunky allows you to apply filters, frames, textures and other effects to photos painlessly. You also don’t need to download yet another program – it’s all online and ready to go for your free print designs. Dive right into BeFunky and get that Instagram inspired photo album rolling!
Pixlr
Pixlr is another free online photo editor for beginners or people just needing a few touch-ups. They offer the use of their platform just for signing up, which is great for your free print designs. Just a few of their features like drawing on photos, retouching photos and applying filters are all available for your use – all free. Check it out and see if you love their intuitive design as much as we do!
Ribbet
Ribbet is the great-looking, online and mobile photo editor. The huge benefit is how easy and intuitive it is to use while being very powerful and robust at the same time. Take a look at Ribbet for all of your free print design needs, and join their growing base of thousands of happy users. 🙂
Takeaways
This isn’t by any means a comprehensive list, but it should get you started on your merch journey if you’re wondering “How the heck am I going to afford all of these designs anyway?” We hope you’ve enjoyed our list!
Make it happen right now.
Written by
Phil Brown
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8 comments
Hey , can I just use a picture directly from pixabay or pexels without modifying it and put it on my products?
Hi there! You would need to modify the images and we advise to check out their Terms of Service.
That’s right. Why Printify hiding that from us?
That happens with all free pic web sites. It’s free, yes, but you can just edit your own design by adding element from those pictures.. Same with Pixabay and Pexels, the ones I’ve used for a while..
Only one way to get desing pictures with full rights for print on demand is paid ones and most of websites have extended license for print on demand and a charge around 50$ per picture..
I’m, personally not aware of any other web site which allows to use their pictures for print on demand for free.
Hi Regi,
As you mentioned yourself, free design pictures with full rights for print on demand are rare. However, not all of them cost so much.
For example, Printify has integration with Shutterstock, which gives you access to over 300 million different images. The fee per image is automatically applied to your order, and the fees are as follows:
– Essentials collection design fee: USD 0.99 per image;
– Full collection design fee: 17.5% of the Printify production cost (with the minimum fee of USD 1.49).
You can find more detailed information about this on Printify’s Help Center.
Great article and it’s really useful for people that just start with POD.
Yes, can you really use all those website’s material for Print on Demand?
Yes, Renzo! You can use our free designs for print on demand products – https://printify.com/free-t-shirt-designs/
You cannot use any image in freepik for POD. If you want to use freepik resources commercially on products that will be sold to multiple clients or for Print on Demand (POD) items, you must ensure that these are not the main element of the design. For example, you cannot sell t-shirts, mugs, vinyls, calendars, etcetera, if these have an image from Freepik as the main element of the design.
This means that you must use your own designs or third party designs to create the main elements of the composition and use Freepik images as backgrounds or secondary elements.
If multiple Freepik images are used to create the design, these will all be considered main elements, as they all belong to Freepik.
You can read our article to learn more about the difference between main and secondary elements.