Essential Design Tools and Resources for Startups in 2023

As a startup owner, you might feel frustrated and overwhelmed by a lack of resources. It is all too familiar when there aren’t funds for a freelancer or agency to assist in essential design necessities. This usually leads to the founder delving into website creation or the marketing team rushing to launch a landing page. In order to assist in making these projects seem professional, there are a few hacks each owner or employee of a startup or small company can implement. Here you will help find examples for inspiration, free fonts, icons, and illustrations, and assemble a website from ready-made libraries.

We’ve rounded up some useful and mostly free tools to help level up your design and put yourself on the map.

Find inspiration and conduct an analysis of how industry leaders do it. Collect examples of design elements and trends.

Explore 750 top-notch landing page examples crafted by leading SaaS companies and startups. Make the best decisions on structure, storytelling, and design.

The gallery features the best 5734 landing page examples. They feature a  convenient categorization by industry, where you can quickly find your sector, such as Insurance, Finance, etc., or search by style, for instance, Minimal, 3D websites, etc.

Find the best hand-picked website design inspiration with daily updates. They offer an easy search by content type and blocks, like About Us, Career, Pricing, etc. You can quickly find several examples for each block.

Before tackling website design work, it's worth creating a site structure, thinking about storytelling, the sequence of blocks, and creating a website prototype.

Develop sitemaps, user flows, and wireframes. Collect and organize everything you need for website development.

It's time to knuckle down on design.

The first tool in website design development is Figma. You can find numerous website templates from the community here. Mentioned below are some other options for those cases where Figma might not be the right fit for you.

You will also need to carefully select fonts and colors, find icons, and perhaps illustrations. Here are our favorite free resources:

The coolest library of free fonts.

And don't forget about Google Fonts; pay attention to font pairing recommendations

When deciding on colors, consider the mood they convey. Color directly influences the emotional impression of the product. Try making use of ready-made color palettes.

When selecting icons, it's best to select either unconventional icons, abstract options that fit the project's style or a minimalist, simple style.

Illustrations are a simple way to create a mood and a distinct style. Initially, you can opt for something from stock resources, but as soon as the opportunity arises, consider ordering custom illustrations. By doing so, you will avoid a situation where another product uses the same illustrations.