0:00:01 – : Welcome to the Uncomplicated Designing podcast. In today’s podcast, I’m going to share with you some free and affordable resources for your designs. So you’re going to get resources for design inspirations, for getting fonts, designing templates, videos, audios and graphics as well. So keep a pen and paper handy or take digital notes as you’re listening to this podcast. Before we begin, a quick introduction. My name Santhosh Shetty. I’m an entrepreneur and an uncomplicated designer. I help entrepreneurs, educators and freelancers create effective and professional designs with uncomplicated designing. So if you are looking to simplify designing and make them effective as well, then this podcast is for you. So please follow or subscribe to keep upgrading yourself.

0:00:44 – (A): Let’s begin. So I’m going to share with you six resources for designing which I personally use when it comes to branding, designing or anything to do with uncomplicated designing. So let’s talk about the first one. The first one is looking for design inspirations. Look for websites where designers upload their work. So there are many websites online, but these are the three places that I suggest. One is dribble.com,

0:01:12 – (A): another one is behance.com and the third one is Google images. Just go there and look for whatever design you’re trying to create. If you’re trying to create a Facebook ad, let’s say just go over there and in the search bar just type Facebook ad and search and you will start seeing a lot of designs which are uploaded by professional designers from around the world. So look for something that suits your business and maybe you can create a folder, copy the designs that you like and then create designs which are similar to it. Don’t copy paste, but create designs similar to it. Pick up certain design elements, get some ideas around it and use that design as an inspiration.

0:01:57 – (A): Second place to look for inspiration is look for top brands and entrepreneurs in your business niche. Go check their website, check their social handles, especially Facebook Instagram. These are the places they’ll be posting pretty regularly. So make notes. Understand what are the kind of designs that are there. And if you like a certain kind of a design again, maybe use a snipping tool, take a screenshot of it, put it in a folder. You can use that design for inspiration as well. And the third place is freelance websites. Go to websites like fiver.com, 99, designsfreelancer.com. There are many more out there.

0:02:36 – (A): You can go ahead and sign up to these freelance sites and look at the designs which are created by freelancers over there. If you find something which is around your business niche and around the kind of design that you’re trying to create, then again, use a snipping tool, take a screenshot, put it in a folder and you can use that as an inspiration for your design. So these are the resources for design inspiration. The next one we are going to talk about is fonts.

0:03:05 – (A): If you’re an entrepreneur or educator, then you just need a brand fonts for yourself. Maybe a primary font and a body font, maybe. But if you’re a freelancer or if you’re creating brand identity for other businesses, then these places will be super useful for you. One is fonts, google.com. It’s completely free. These are fonts by Google. And you have all kinds of fonts over there and you can use it commercially as well.

0:03:32 – (A): Another website that you can try is dafonts. That is d a f o n t s. So this is another place where you can look for. There are like thousands and thousands of fonts over there. So look for fonts, something that you like, download it, but be careful before you use it on your website or anywhere else, just check for license information and see if you can use it commercially. If you cannot use it commercially, then when you click on that font red, there will be an option of purchasing that font.

0:04:05 – (A): Let me just warn you, fonts are not cheap. They are very, very expensive when you want to take commercial license. That is why I always suggest look for similar fonts in fonts. Google.com. Another great place I go to look for fonts is thousand one fonts.com. That’s a great place. So there are again thousands and thousands of fonts here and very similar to da fonts. There are free fonts as well, but there are also fonts which are paid.

0:04:35 – (A): And if you like something very, very much, and if it is paid, you can also purchase it from there. So those are the places I go to look for fonts. And then is the third resource that we are going to talk about is designing templates. Now, designing templates is very popular nowadays. It’s not like before where you have to build everything from scratch. There are places where you can look for whatever design template that you want and start editing it.

0:05:01 – (A): One of the coolest software that I’ve come across, it’s a cloud based software, is canva. This is what I have been using for many, many years now. I completely stopped using Photoshop in illustrator once I started working on canva because it saves a lot of time and a lot of money. So Canva has all kinds of templates, so please check it out. If you do not have canva, then please sign up to Canva. I’ll share my affiliate link with you. It’s Santo me canva. Okay, you can go ahead, go to this link and you can sign up for free.

0:05:40 – (A): Or you can also try a 30 day free trial for the Canva Pro version. Canva Pro will give you additional premium templates that you can use for your designs. If you don’t want to continue with Canva Pro, you can always come back to the free version before the Canva Pro trial expires, so you don’t have to pay anything. The second place for design templates is Adobe Creative Express. Adobe also have their own version of canva. You can say they also have a place where you can look for design templates and start working on it.

0:06:15 – (A): I haven’t used Adobe Creative Express, to be honest. I started using it initially, but I didn’t find it as good as canva. Maybe they have improved now, maybe not. I don’t know. I feel canva is way ahead as far as a design software is concerned. A cloud based designing software is concerned. Adobe is good with Photoshop, illustrator and all that, but cloud based design software, I think canva is still ahead at this point of time. So I would suggest trying canva out videos. If you’re somebody who creates lot of these videos and you want some video footages, then these are the websites that you can go to canva.

0:06:52 – (A): If you sign up to canva, then canva has their own stash of video footages that you can use for your YouTube or for your reels or anything. And other than canva, there is Adobe Creative express as well. So other than that, we have user generated content as well. There are a couple of sites, I would suggest. One is pixabay.com, another one is Pexels.com, which is pexels.com. These are the sites you can go to if you are looking for video footages.

0:07:24 – (A): And if you don’t find any of these footages over here, these are all free resources. All right? So if you don’t find it here, then you can try Shutterstock. This is a place where you’ll get amazing video footages. But the only thing is it’s not for free. You’ll have to purchase, if you like, any footage over here. So the fifth one we are going to talk about is audios. If you are a creator, if you are a YouTuber, or if you create reels or anything, then this is like super useful.

0:07:53 – (A): So there are just three places I suggest. One is YouTube studio. They have their own commercial licensed audios over there which you can use not only in YouTube, you can also download it and use it in your other videos as well. It’s free. And then we have Pixabay. Even in Pixabay you have audios that you can download and use for your work. Now the only difference here is in Pixabay you’ll have to sign in and then download it so that you get the commercial license. So if there is a copyright strike anywhere in Instagram or YouTube or anywhere, you can always send them an email or share the license that you have got from Pixabay, then that strike will be removed. Okay, if you don’t sign up to Pixabay and then you download audio and if some copyright strike happens then there is nothing you can do.

0:08:44 – (A): You will have to take down your video. The third place that you can get audios for commercial use is canva. Canva is also a great place. There are like thousands and thousands of audio files over here that you can use for your video clips. And the final resource is graphic elements. So whenever you’re creating any designs, you would need certain kind of graphic elements, right? Earlier what I used to do is I used to search in Google, then put it into illustrator and image trace it and then convert it into a vector. All that long process of creating a vector file, I don’t do it anymore, anymore because now I use canva. Canva has ready made design elements and whatever that I need is there. So I don’t need to create, it’s create anything using illustrator.

0:09:34 – (A): So it simplifies the entire process and you can get whatever kind of graphic elements you want. Apart from canva. You can also check in Pixabay again when you’re downloading from Pixabay, make sure you’re signed in and you have license for it. Don’t download graphics from Google because it might have license connected to it and you might get into trouble. Don’t do it. Use canva or Pixabay. So those are my resources. There are many, many more. You can always Google and look for these resources, but before you download, make sure they are.

0:10:09 – (A): If it is free then you have to make sure that it is free to use for commercial purposes. And if it is not free then you’ll have to purchase. Depending on what you’re downloading, the price varies as well. That’s all my friend. I hope you got a lot of value out of this podcast. If you did, then please support my podcast by following the podcast on Spotify, Google, Audible, Apple, or wherever you are listening to whichever platform you’re listening to.

0:10:35 – (A): And don’t forget to give me a like and five stars for this podcast and share it on social media or with someone who would find this podcast useful. And if you’re an entrepreneur, educator, or a freelancer, and if you are looking to simplify designing for your business or add an additional income source using uncomplicated designing, then please check my website out. I have a lot of cool stuff for you. It’s www.designplans.com.

0:11:02 – (A): That’s all for today. Thank you so much for listening to the uncomplicated designing podcast. The next podcast will be on next Monday, so until then, this is Santhosh Shetty here from design plans. Have a wonderful day. I’ll see you. You.