Web design tools: free tools for web designers and graphic designers

The best free tools for web designers in 2026 are Figma (Starter plan) or Penpot for design, Affinity, GIMP and Inkscape for graphics, Google Fonts for fonts, Unsplash and Pexels for photos, and PageSpeed Insights and WAVE to check speed and accessibility. With these you can do web design for free, at a professional level.

In 2021 the Italian original of this article was a list of free photo and font sites. Since then many tools have disappeared, others have become free and almost all of them have added AI. Here’s the updated toolbox: the software for web designers and the free web graphics resources we actually use, grouped by stage of work.

Which free software for web designers should you use in 2026?

To design a website or an online shop you only need a few programs, all free or with a free plan that’s enough to get started:

Program	What it’s for	What’s free
Figma	Designing interfaces, prototypes, design systems	Starter plan, with limits on files, collaborators and AI credits
Penpot	The same, but open source and based on web standards	Everything, and you can install it on your own server
Affinity	Vector graphics, photo editing and layout in a single app	Free since late October 2025; AI features require a Canva subscription
GIMP	Photo retouching and compositing	Everything, open source
Inkscape	Vector graphics, logos, SVG icons	Everything, open source
Visual Studio Code	Writing and checking code	Everything
Canva	Quick graphics for social media and presentations	Free plan, with many elements paid only

If you’re starting from scratch, choose one program per stage and learn it well: Figma or Penpot for design, Affinity for graphics, Visual Studio Code for code. Changing tool every week is the quickest way to learn nothing.

Where can you find free high-resolution images for websites?

The most used free image libraries are Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay. Then there are smaller archives, useful for getting away from the photos everyone uses:

• Unsplash: high-quality photos, excellent search.
• Pexels: free photos and videos.
• Pixabay: photos, illustrations, vectors and videos.
• Gratisography: original, slightly quirky photos, for anyone who doesn’t want the usual handshake.
• Foodiesfeed: food photos, useful for restaurants and food online shops.
• ISO Republic, SplitShire and Picography: smaller archives, with less-seen photos.
• New Old Stock: vintage photos from public archives, with no known copyright restrictions.

Two rules before downloading:

1. Read the licence of each site: almost all allow commercial use, but with limits (for example, you can’t resell the photo as it is).
2. Be careful with recognisable people, brands and works: in advertising you may need releases that the image library doesn’t give you.

And AI-generated images? They’re useful for drafts and backgrounds, but check the tool’s terms of use and don’t use them to show “real” products or people that don’t exist: in an online shop it would be misleading.

Where can you find free web graphics and mockups?

For illustrations, backgrounds and mockups there are good-quality free resources:

• Freepik: vectors, mockups and photos. On the free plan you usually have to credit the author.
• unDraw and Storyset: illustrations you can customise in your brand colours.
• Haikei: SVG backgrounds and shapes generated on the fly (waves, blobs, gradients).
• Figma Community: thousands of UI kits, icons and mockups to duplicate into your files.

Which free fonts should you use for a website?

The safest free fonts for a website are those from Google Fonts and Fontshare, with licences that allow commercial use. The resources to know:

Resource	What you’ll find	Watch out for
Google Fonts	Hundreds of open source fonts	Better to host them on your own site, for the GDPR
Fontshare	Quality fonts, free for commercial use too	Read the licence of each font
Bunny Fonts	The same fonts as Google, served from European servers	—
Font Squirrel	Selected fonts with a commercial licence	—
Dafont and 1001 Free Fonts	Decorative and unusual fonts	Many are free for personal use only

On the GDPR: in Germany, in 2022, the Munich court ruled against a website that loaded Google Fonts from Google’s servers, because it passed visitors’ IP addresses without consent. Hosting fonts on your own server removes the problem and often makes the site faster too.

To find out which font a site you like uses, there’s the Chrome extension WhatFont. To pair fonts, try the combinations directly on your layout: that’s the test that counts.

Which free tools should you use for colours, icons and images?

For the details that make the difference between a polished site and a rushed one:

• Colours: Coolors to create palettes, Realtime Colors to see them straight away on a sample site.
• Contrast: WebAIM’s Contrast Checker tells you whether text and background are readable according to the WCAG.
• Icons: Lucide and Heroicons, lightweight, consistent SVG icons.
• Image compression: Squoosh to convert to WebP and AVIF, TinyPNG for PNG and JPG.

How do you check a site’s speed and accessibility for free?

A beautiful site that’s slow, or that can’t be used by keyboard, doesn’t work. Three free checks to run before delivering every project:

1. PageSpeed Insights: measures the Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) with real user data, where available, and with a lab test.
2. Lighthouse, built into Chrome (DevTools): performance, accessibility, SEO and best practices, page by page.
3. WAVE by WebAIM: flags accessibility problems on the page, such as images without alternative text, low contrast and fields without labels.

It’s not just good practice: since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act has required many e-commerce and service websites to be accessible. A web designer who knows how to design accessible sites is worth more today.

Where can you find web design inspiration?

Looking at lots of well-made sites is the quickest way to train your eye. The most useful galleries:

• Awwwards: award-winning sites, often experimental.
• SiteInspire: a gallery of sites you can filter by style and sector.
• Mobbin: screens from real apps and sites, useful for studying flows such as sign-up and checkout.

A tip from the workshop: don’t copy a site you like, ask yourself why it works. What does the user see first? What do they have to do? How fast is it?

What role does AI play in web design tools?

Today almost every web design tool has AI features: Figma generates layouts and prototypes from a description, Canva and Affinity (with a subscription) fill and extend images, code editors suggest whole functions. Used well, they save hours on repetitive work.

The key is “used well”. AI quickly produces a plausible draft. Working out whether it’s right for that client, whether it’s readable, fast and accessible, is still brain work. On free plans, AI features also have credit limits, so it’s worth using them where they really make a difference.

Is a free tool enough to become a web designer?

No: the tools are free, the craft isn’t. You learn it by doing real projects, with someone correcting you.

That’s why we created our AI Academy: a one-year programme, for up to 4 participants, inside the Flag agency in Frattamaggiore (Naples, Italy), taught in Italian, on real projects in web design, advanced AI, e-commerce, SEO, CRO and Google Ads. If instead you’re looking for someone to build the site for you, have a look at our business websites that bring in leads or PrestaShop e-commerce development.

Want more practical tools? Also read how to write product descriptions for an online shop, with AI too.