5 free design resources to get you through your holiday season campaigns

To help out all the email marketers who need to pass on ideas to their designer or perhaps need to do the grunt work themselves, we’ve assembled 5 free design resources to get you through your holiday season campaigns.

During the holiday season, things can get a little chaotic as marketers push themselves to overdrive rolling out seasonal campaigns and promotions. A crucial element to this season is producing visual material that not only looks amazing but also sells the product or service we are marketing. But when you’re not a designer it can be hard enough to find the inspiration for Christmas design let alone bring it into your email campaigns.

So what’s a marketer to do? Well, below we’ve listed our tips for 5 free design resources that will cover you in everything from royalty-free images and fonts right through to icons and graphic design templates.

Unsplash

If you’re looking for royalty-free photos for your Christmas and holiday campaigns then you’re absolutely first choice should be Unsplash. All their photos are stunningly beautiful and are the antithesis of bad stock images. Did I mention they are free to use?

A selection of holiday-themed images available on unsplash.com

In fact, we love Unsplash so much that we built an integration with their amazing gallery and our own platform.

Fangirling hard over everything Unsplash does. via GIPHY. 

This means that Ungapped users can insert and edit thousands of royalty-free images directly from their own email campaigns. Ungapped also allows you to search images based on category which for some reason, is not available on the Unsplash website.

Browse, select and insert Unsplash images directly into your mailings.

Let me introduce you to your new best friends: Ungapped and Unsplash.

Canva

Canva is a great resource for non-designers that want to create excellent visuals for their email campaigns but need the aid of templates and guides. One of the best things about Canva is that it’s really easy to use. You’ll be able to pump out images and graphics for your Christmas and holiday campaigns in next to no time.

A selection of social media graphic templates available on Canva. Source: Canva

Related: How to use colors in your newsletters & email designs

Iconfinder

If you want to add smaller icons to your holiday-themed mailings or even customize images with the addition then look no further than Iconfinder. With over 1 million icons Iconfinder is the perfect place to look for those smaller graphics.

So many icons that you won’t know what to do with them. Source: iconfiner.com

Related: 18 Instagram accounts to follow for email inspiration

Foap

While not totally free, Foap is an app that crowdsources their pictures via gamification and competitions. If you’re looking for images for social media that are particularly niched then this might be the place to look.

Images are crowdsourced by hosting ‘missions’. Source: foap.com

Free Design Resources

A site that I recently stumbled on myself, Free Design Resources is a site that highlights beautiful typography, textures, mockups and more that are high quality and free to use. Now, while it seems super easy to download the resources, it might be a little more complicated to put them to use since you’ll need graphic design software like Photoshop or Indesign. If you’ve got some experience with these tools then you’ll be fine. However, if this is unchartered territory then you may want to start with an app like Canva first.

Free design resources offers everything from font and typeface to textures and themes. Source: freedesignresources.net

So there you have it – 5 free design resources that we hope you’ll find useful for your holiday season campaigns. Using another free design resource? Let us know what you’re using by tweeting to us @ungapped.