When I just started as a freelancer, I realized there’s a lot to master and explore creative projects. With a limited budget, where do you learn and obtain free resources to build your portfolio?
This is a list that I have been using. Hope it helps!
Stock Images & Graphics:
- Pexels / Pixabay
High quality royalty free images and videos. You can find illustration, music and vector graphics in Pixabay too. - Freepik
Similar to Pixabay, there’s a great variety of free resources for personal and commercial uses. But credits to author is required if you’re not a premium member. - Envato Market
Aka Themeforest or CodeCanyon, sign up to its newsletter for the monthly freebies. You will receive a list of items to download, e.g. WordPress Theme, plugins, audio, video, photoshop actions, 3D model.
Web Tools:
- Built With
Find out what the website is built with. - Canva
A graphic design platform that had gained a lot of popularity over the years. - Ezgif
An easy to use gif editor, edit, crop, resize and optimize your gif animation here. - IFTTT / Zapier
If you are into automation, you should try exploring these. - Google <- click here for the full list
Needless to say, Google offers a lot of free awesome tools, to name a few: - Imagify / Shortpixel
Image compression with no quality loss. This is essential to your website performance by reducing size. - Have I been Pwned
Check if your email and password have been compromised. Read my article here. - Pocket
Save content from any website to read later. - Trello
Organize your plans or projects to keep your client updated with this neat and simple boards. - WaveApps
Financial software for book keeping. - WeTransfer
Send large files to your contacts, up to 2gb.
Software:
- Blender
Blender is am free open source 3D creative suite. You can use this for full 2D and 3D animation pipeline. From 3d modeling, animation to compositing, video editing. - OBS Studio
Free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. - Natron
Open Source Compositing Software For VFX and Motion Graphics.
Self-learning:
Thanks to the content creators in the world who have contributed to the abundance of tutorials available online. We can find almost everything we need here:
- Facebook Community
Join a community of the topics you are interested in. Most of the members in popular groups are very supportive, you should be able to get a reply from the support team or members quickly. - Quora
Similar to the above, but topics are not as defined as community. - W3Schools
You can learn to program in HTML, CSS, Java, Python, etc and test your script here. - Wikipedia
Free online encyclopedia, I even obtain guides on how to clean the toilet or take care of my pets here. - Youtube
Not my preferred channel as time is wasted watching with no solution sometimes, but Youtube tutorial helps a lot when it comes to the GUI navigations sometimes.
Reference:
Looking for more ideas on your projects? Find them here:
That’s all for now, I will keep adding more to the list when I come across more useful links. Share your recommendation in a comment!
Last updated on 1st May 2020
