Free design assets worth shipping — the license-vetted list

Every asset below has been license-checked before being used on a real client site. That is the whole point of this list: not "50 free resources", but the short list that survives a license review. Bookmark it, and read the two rules at the end before you ship anything.

Icons

• Lucide (lucide.dev) — ISC license. The default for interface icons: consistent stroke, huge set, first-class React package. This site runs on it.
• Phosphor (phosphoricons.com) — MIT. Six weights from thin to duotone, great when a brand needs a softer or heavier voice than Lucide.
• Tabler Icons (tabler.io/icons) — MIT. More than 5,000 icons, pixel-grid aligned, strong on dashboard and dev-tool glyphs.
• Iconoir (iconoir.com) — MIT. Distinctive rounded style when you want to not look like every other SaaS.

Pick one set per project. Mixing icon sets is the fastest way to make an interface feel cheap.

3D models and lighting

• Kenney (kenney.nl/assets) — CC0. Game-style low-poly packs: food, vehicles, furniture. Tiny files, zero attribution required. I used the Food Kit and Car Kit on this very site.
• Quaternius (quaternius.com) — CC0. Low-poly packs, GLB-ready, complements Kenney well.
• Poly Haven (polyhaven.com) — CC0. Professional HDRIs for studio lighting, plus textures. One 1k HDRI is usually all a product scene needs.
• pmndrs market (market.pmnd.rs) — CC0. The React-Three-Fiber community's curated model and HDRI market.
• Sketchfab (sketchfab.com) — per-model licensing. Huge catalog; always filter by CC0 or CC-BY and keep the attribution when CC-BY.

Pipeline tip: run everything through npx @gltf-transform/cli optimize before it goes near a browser. Textures at 512px are enough for most web scenes.

Photos

• Unsplash (unsplash.com) — Unsplash license: free for commercial use, no attribution required, but you cannot resell the photos themselves.
• Pexels (pexels.com) — similar terms, stronger on video.

Treat both as raw material: crop hard, apply your own grade or grayscale so photos sit inside your palette instead of fighting it.

Fonts

• Google Fonts (fonts.google.com) — all open source (OFL mostly). Self-host via your framework instead of the Google CDN: faster, and cleaner on privacy.
• Fontshare (fontshare.com) — free quality fonts from the Indian Type Foundry. Check each family's license; most allow commercial use.
• Fontsource (fontsource.org) — npm packages for self-hosting open fonts with one import.

Two families per site, maximum. One for display, one for text.

UI components and code

• shadcn/ui (ui.shadcn.com) — MIT. Copy-in components on accessible Radix primitives. The industry default for a reason.
• reactbits.dev — MIT with Commons Clause: free to use in any site including commercial work; you cannot resell the components themselves. Read that clause before building a template business on it.
• blocks.so — MIT. Ready shadcn/ui blocks for landing sections and dashboards.

The two rules

Rule 1: check the license at the source, every time. Aggregator sites lie by omission. Go to the actual repository or license page. CC0 means do anything; CC-BY means credit visibly; MIT means keep the copyright notice in your source.

Rule 2: keep a record. One markdown file in the repo listing every external asset, its source, and its license. Five minutes of bookkeeping, and license questions from a client become a copy-paste answer. This guide started life as exactly that file.