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There are two things virtually everyone is running short on: time and money. This is especially true for designers living in the L&D world. The double whammy of shrinking budgets and increasing workloads makes it challenging to get the design assets you need to make your projects look like a million bucks.

Fortunately, if you know where to look, it’s easy to tap into a wealth of high-quality design assets available for free online. In this session, you’ll uncover a huge collection of high-quality resources suitable for your creative toolkit. Among graphics, fonts, icons, and more, you’ll find the design resources you need to make your projects look polished and be more effective—no budget requests required!

In this session, you will learn:

• Where to find a wide range of design resources organized by category
• About some of the top resources in each category
• A few creative tips that can help you extend these resources even further

Because there isn’t enough time to cover all the great resources for finding design assets, you can find even more on my free design resources page.

Slides

Handout

This is a small subset of my larger design resources collection that I find the most useful.

We also covered a few nifty tricks that can help you extend the resources you have available even further.  You can download the tip sheet or hit the links below to dig deeper into the details.

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Download the Design Resources Handout

FontJoy

FontJoy is a free, easy to use tool that will help you find a great set of fonts for your project.  Just click (Generate) to create a new font pairing, (Lock) to lock fonts that you want to keep, and (Edit) to choose a font manually. The text is editable, try replacing it with your company name or other copy.

Converting Font Characters into Icon Shapes

You can use Taylor Croonquist’s “Font Cutter” technique to convert font characters into editable icon shapes. Learn how easy it is at nutsandboltsspeedtraining.com/phone-icons/

Editing Vector Graphics in PowerPoint

Do you know how to use PowerPoint to edit .EPS files? Older versions may still be able to do this but a recent update disabled the ability to add .EPS files into PowerPoint.

But don’t worry. You can still get your .EPS files into PowerPoint and edit them if you convert them to .EMF format. One easy way for that is to use convertio.co/eps-emf

Once you break them apart you can customize them and/or break them apart and use individual elements from a larger graphic.