Wells
Places worth drawing from. Every one of these is a site we save out of ourselves — archives, galleries, and the feeds where visual work turns up before it is anywhere else.
84 places
NASA Image and Video Library
images.nasa.gov
Every mission NASA has flown, in full resolution and almost entirely public domain.
Pexels
pexels.com
Free photography and stock video, generously licensed, in quantity.
ArtStation
artstation.com
Where the people who make games and films put their work. The deep end for concept art and 3D.
itch.io
itch.io
Thousands of indie games, each with its own cover art and screenshots. A pixel-art well that never runs dry.
Lospec
lospec.com
Palettes, pixel art and tutorials, all catalogued. The place to steal a colour scheme from.
Game UI Database
gameuidatabase.com
Fifteen thousand screens of game interface, tagged by genre, platform and element.
Dribbble
dribbble.com
Interface and brand work in small, finished pieces. Good for a shot of a component, not a whole product.
Behance
behance.net
Full case studies rather than single shots — where a brand or an editorial layout is shown end to end.
Awwwards
awwwards.com
The web at its most ambitious, judged daily. Best used as a feed of what a site can be.
SiteInspire
siteinspire.com
A quieter gallery of web design, filterable by style, type and subject.
The Public Domain Review
publicdomainreview.org
Centuries of illustration, prints and diagrams that are out of copyright and stranger than anything current.
The Met Collection
metmuseum.org
Half a million works, a huge share of them open access and downloadable at full size.
Flickr Commons
flickr.com
The world's public photo archives in one place, with no known copyright restrictions.
YouTube
youtube.com
The largest reference library there is — and JayBoard will take a frame out of any of it.
TikTok
tiktok.com
Where visual trends start. Worth saving from before the algorithm buries what you saw.
Reddit
reddit.com
Every niche has a subreddit posting images all day: r/gamedev, r/DesignPorn, r/EarthPorn, and so on down.
Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.org
A hundred million freely licensed files — photographs, maps, diagrams — behind one search box.
ESA/Hubble
esahubble.org
Thirty-five years of Hubble, released at full resolution and free to use with credit.
Webb Telescope
webbtelescope.org
The deepest images ever taken, in false colour that looks like nothing else.
Internet Archive
archive.org
Books, films, software, magazines and the web itself, going back further than you expect.
Rijksmuseum
rijksmuseum.nl
Rijksstudio hands you 700,000 works at print resolution and invites you to cut them up.
NYPL Digital Collections
digitalcollections.nypl.org
Nine hundred thousand items from the New York Public Library, much of it public domain.
David Rumsey Map Collection
davidrumsey.com
A hundred thousand historical maps, zoomable to the engraving.
Poly Haven
polyhaven.com
HDRIs, textures and models, all CC0, all usable in anything without asking.
Sketchfab
sketchfab.com
Millions of 3D models you can spin in the browser before deciding you want them.
Kenney
kenney.nl
Thousands of game assets in a consistent style, given away for nothing.
80 Level
80.lv
Breakdowns from the people making game and film art, with the work shown at every stage.
Interface In Game
interfaceingame.com
Game interface catalogued screen by screen, tagged by what each element does.
Mobbin
mobbin.com
Real app screens by the flow rather than the shot — how a product actually gets you through sign-up.
Godly
godly.website
Astronomically good web design, updated daily and mercilessly curated.
Minimal Gallery
minimal.gallery
Sites that get out of their own way. A useful counterweight to the maximalist galleries.
Typewolf
typewolf.com
What fonts are being used, on what sites, right now — with the pairings named.
Fonts In Use
fontsinuse.com
Type in the wild, indexed by typeface, industry and period. Print as well as screen.
Colossal
thisiscolossal.com
Art and visual culture, posted daily, with the pictures big enough to be worth saving.
It's Nice That
itsnicethat.com
Graphic design and illustration journalism — new work with the thinking attached.
Dezeen
dezeen.com
Architecture and design, shot well and published constantly.
ArchDaily
archdaily.com
Buildings in photographs and plans, thousands of projects deep.
Are.na
are.na
Where people who take collecting seriously keep their channels. Slow, quiet, and very deep.
Magnum Photos
magnumphotos.com
Seventy-five years of photojournalism from the agency that defined it.
Unsplash
unsplash.com
The photography library everyone reaches for first, free to use and enormous.
X
x.com
Still the fastest place to see a piece of work before it is anywhere else, and the fastest to lose it.
Getty Open Content
getty.edu
The Getty's collection, with everything it can release put out at full resolution and no strings.
Cleveland Museum of Art
clevelandart.org
Thirty thousand open-access works, filterable down to the ones you can actually use.
Smithsonian Open Access
si.edu
Nearly five million items across nineteen museums, released into the public domain.
Google Arts & Culture
artsandculture.google.com
Gigapixel scans of works you would otherwise need to stand in front of.
Europeana
europeana.eu
Fifty million items from European libraries and museums, with the rights on every one made plain.
Wellcome Collection
wellcomecollection.org
Medical and scientific illustration going back to the woodcut, freely licensed.
NASA Earth Observatory
earthobservatory.nasa.gov
The planet from orbit, published daily with an explanation of what you are looking at.
Macaulay Library
macaulaylibrary.org
Cornell's wildlife archive — millions of bird photographs, and the sounds to go with them.
iNaturalist
inaturalist.org
Every species, photographed by whoever found it. A reference library for how things actually look.
OpenGameArt
opengameart.org
Freely licensed game art, sorted by what you can legally do with it.
Game-Icons.net
game-icons.net
Four thousand game icons as clean SVG, recolourable and free.
The Spriters Resource
spriters-resource.com
Sprite sheets ripped from thirty years of games, catalogued by console and title.
ambientCG
ambientcg.com
PBR materials, all CC0, in the resolutions you actually need.
Refero
refero.design
Real product interfaces broken into screens and flows, filterable by pattern.
Lapa Ninja
lapa.ninja
Landing pages by category, plus the free UI kits and illustrations behind a lot of them.
One Page Love
onepagelove.com
Fifteen years of one-page sites, which is the constraint that makes design decisions visible.
Httpster
httpster.net
A running feed of sites that are doing something, with none of the awards ceremony.
Screenlane
screenlane.com
Mobile screens by app and by pattern — onboarding, empty states, paywalls, the lot.
Klim Type Foundry
klim.co.nz
Specimens written like essays. Worth saving for the layouts as much as the typefaces.
Pangram Pangram
pangrampangram.com
A foundry whose specimen pages are their own argument for the typeface.
Letterform Archive
letterformarchive.org
Original graphic design and lettering, photographed at a resolution that shows the ink.
Vimeo
vimeo.com
Where the film and motion work lives, at a bitrate that survives being looked at closely.
Motionographer
motionographer.com
Motion design and animation, with the studios and the breakdowns named.
Sakugabooru
sakugabooru.com
Animation cut by cut, tagged by animator. The reference library for how movement is drawn.
Pinterest
pinterest.com
The biggest visual index there is — and the one hardest to get anything back out of.
Savee
savee.it
A quieter, better-looking place to keep images, with a community that curates hard.
Cosmos
cosmos.so
Visual collecting for people who want the feed to stay theirs.
500px
500px.com
Photography with the technical bar set high, and the metadata to learn from.
LensCulture
lensculture.com
Contemporary photography from everywhere, with the work presented as series rather than singles.
Land-book
land-book.com
Landing pages, filterable by industry, style and section. The best place to steal a hero from.
Film-Grab
film-grab.com
Stills from a thousand films, grabbed at full frame. The colour reference library.
Pixel Joint
pixeljoint.com
The pixel art community, with two decades of daily entries and a hall of fame worth crawling.
VGMaps
vgmaps.com
Whole game levels stitched into single maps. The best way to look at level design flat.
3dtotal
3dtotal.com
Galleries and breakdowns from the 3D and concept art industry, going back twenty years.
Concept Art World
conceptartworld.com
Concept art from games and films, posted as full sets rather than single images.
Fab
fab.com
Epic's marketplace — Quixel's scans, Unreal's assets and Sketchfab's store in one place.
Unity Asset Store
assetstore.unity.com
Asset packs by the thousand, and a good look at what a genre's art is expected to be.
Steam
store.steampowered.com
Capsule art and store screenshots — the single best study of how a game sells itself in one image.
Cara
cara.app
Where a lot of concept and illustration work moved to. Human-made by policy.
Textures.com
textures.com
Photographic texture reference, shot flat and tiled, for when a material has to look real.
Mixamo
mixamo.com
Rigged characters and a library of motion-captured animation, free with an Adobe account.
Game Developer
gamedeveloper.com
The old Gamasutra: postmortems and deep dives, usually illustrated with the work in progress.
rileyb3d Library
rileyb3d.com
Three hundred packed .blend props — rooms, furniture, vegetation, sci-fi. Two a day on a free account.
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