You know as well as I do that not every designer makes every single item within a website. Designers pull from, use, and download all sorts of media from many places. If you are custom making everything you put into a design, Good for you! But that is most likely taking up a lot of precious time that could be spent else where. Let’s look as some of the resources that you can use for some of the more popular design elements and even a trend.
Images/Hero Images
There are plenty of sites for getting images and specifically hero images since those images are very large and are always in dire need of good quality. Some important factors of getting images are making sure they are not copyrighted and ensuring you grabbed the right size. 2 resources that could save you a bit of time would be using: https://heroimages.com/ for hero images or https://www.shutterstock.com/ to find tons and tons of free to use images after making an account.
Colors, Gradients, Themes
Colors are needed for any customization within your design and I don’t think these need much explaining. Gradients are used some in modern website design and having a set of colors for your theme can change the overall feel and appearance of your website. So it is really nice when you don’t have to go searching for that information yourself. Some prime resources to help get colors are https://color.adobe.com/create which in my opinion is the best option since it has a very easy to use automated wheel. Some others are https://coolors.co/ and https://colorhunt.co/. Very useful in regards to finding lots of random color schemes.
Web-Safe Big Yet Simple Fonts
A modern trend for today is using simpler yet larger fonts and it is very important to use web-safe fonts so that your website is not only appealing but it is faster since every computer can load that font. If you use custom fonts you are risking site speed. It is nice to be able to use resources that will help give you those web safe fonts you need. The best choice for this would be to use https://fonts.google.com/. This is straight from Google itself which ensures font safety. Another very good resource is https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts.
Why be Custom When You Can be Smart
Being aware of when it is good to be custom and good to use your resources is very valuable. It can help show you more ways to utilize trends efficiently and up your design game. If you want a better understanding for trends you can find them in my previous blog: https://aaronwilson.school.blog/2020/01/16/the-2020-web-design-trends-you-should-be-looking-at/
DME 120 Introdution 