Us designers are of special blood. We need food - yes, yes, we also ingest “normal” food like everybody else (at least that’s what we should do), but more importantly, we need food for our creative brains. And of that we need a lot. In fact, the nature of our jobs makes us depend on valuable resources we can build upon, tweak, implement, use, modify, adjust, slam, bawl out. Kinda.

This is where resources come in handy. Every designer we know has their own collection of resources, either big or bigger, and spends a lot of time searching for pictures, images, fonts, vectors, videos, and other stuff.

In this post, we’ll give you Vibr8bros’ top Photo, Vector and Flash stock sites on the web. The post also contains some affiliate links. But be warned: knowing where we get our stuff from doesn’t necessarily make you a good designer. It can make things easier for you - but awesome resources don’t give you the knowledge and skills you need to become an awesome designer. You’ll have to stick around on our blog a lil’ longer for that ;)

Let’s get it on then, shall we?

1. Top free Photo stock websites

The following sites offer free downloads of high-resolution stock imagery. They are the few free sites we think offer the most quality you can get for no money at all.

Stock Exchange (SXC) claims to be the leading free photo stock site. Well, it sure looks that way! The little brother of the great one dollar stock site stockxpert.com has the ease and functionality of the big ones - only that it’s for free. Over 1 million registered users are browsing through about 350.000 images.

• Extra: Stock Exchange Firefox Search Plugin (direct link)

morgueFile is another free stock site for photos. The cool thing about it is how well the images are organized. You browse by detailed categories (like people - body parts - hands), and you almost always get what you’re looking for. Of course, the site has a search function as well.

Stockvault is a nice little site (8.000 images by August 1, 2007), but it’s pretty well organized, looks good and is growing steadily. The quality of the photos is quite good as well, that’s why we decided to feature it in the list.

Image After is adorable! The neat design and simplicity of the site is contagious: mainly, you have two dropdown fields, one for images and one for patterns. Nice! Image After is run by “three persons [sic!] from the Netherlands involved in design one way or another”, and this is where they give us their photos for free download.

• Extra: Image After Firefox Search Plugin (install page)

More free photo stock sites are Pixel Perfect Digital and FreePhotosBank.

2. Top free Vector stock websites

Free vectors are highly sought after by many, and you can really find a vast amount of free vector packs on the web. Also, some design blogs post own vector packs for free download (like us, hint hint). We’ve collected one terriffic download site as well as a few blogs that post good quality vectors for free.

Vecteezy is a goodie! They host user-generated vectors of usually amazing quality. It seems that they have about 230 vector packs right now. Packs contain a various amount of vectors, usually in a theme, like badges, or swooshes and swirls. You’ve got to check them out.

Bittbox is an excellent design blog run by a UK-based designer. It has lots of freebies - not only vectors, but also brushes and images - as well as tutorials and tips for design applications. The link will take you to the freebies category.

Dezignus is a great resource as well. The blog features vectors, images and brushes from the web and also own collections and packs for free. The only shortcoming is that they host files on Rapidshare or Depositfiles, which only offer so many free downloads. Not too convenient… but still, check Dezignus out, it’s worth a try!

Beeex is another great resource for freebies. Their tagline is “Strictly-Free Quality Resources for Designers and Web Developers” - that says it all, right? Beeex features free packs and collections from all over the web, and they also publish their own stuff. They have vectors, Photoshop brushes, Fonts, Tutorials, and more. Check them out.

Another great blog for free vectors and more is spoongraphics.

3. Top 1$ Photo, Vector, and Flash stock websites

These photo stock sites have great stock images for as low as 1$. You might want to consider taking a close look at these (sign-up is free with these sites - do it and use them as a source of inspiration)! They can save you a lot of time. And because time is money, they are an excellent choice when it comes to stock photography.

iStockphoto is our choice number one in this category. They have a great interface and an extended search function. You can search by color, by orientation (for example, search for photos with a girl in the lower left and sky on the upper right), by tags and keywords, by relevance and so much more. iStockphoto has over 2.7 million files on stock (photos, vectors, Flash and video). You wanna be a designer? Dude, sign up here for free!

stockxpert is sxc’s big brother. They have lots of great, high-quality images, some that you can’t find anywhere else. A wide range of categories seduces you to browse and get inspired for hours. Have you ever seen categories such as “Blurs” or “Play with Light”? Well, go here and check it out! Sign-up is free at stockxpert.

• Extra: stockxpert Firefox Search Plugin (direct link)

Dreamstime is another great site for 1-dollar-pictures. They have a nice and quick interface, organized in categories and sub-categories. You can also make money by selling your photography. Dreamstime has over 2.3 million files and about 500.000 users.

FlashDen is a good site for stock Flash, audio, video and fonts. Sign-up is free as well. Again: If you work with Flash, you should sign-up and see what’s on and what’s in. Even if you don’t want to spend money on Flash stock, you can get lots of inspiration and ideas just by browsing around.

Arsenal is a great resource for stock vectors. They constantly upload new royalty-free vector packs. The site is from the guys at Go!Media, a trendsetting design company. Their impressive vectors mainly fall into the “destroyed” and “grunge” category. They come as fixed-priced packs - not for 1$ but very affordable. What you get is highly professional artwork - worth a closer look!

Another good 1-dollar photography site is 123rf.com. Also, try out Vectorstock.com. That’s a vector-only dollar stock site with partly good quality. They also have a monthly vector for free download, which is pretty cool.

Last, but not least

Free is always relative! You’ll never get the quality for free that you can get if you are willing to pay just a few bucks. It’s quite easy to figure out: do you want to spend hours on searching for a free resource, possibly never finding the right one, or do you want to pay 1$ for the exact image you were looking for?

If time is something you’ve got a lot of, then go for the free sites. If not, you should try the 1$-pages out. Especially when you’re working on a job and you get paid for it.

We’d like to know what you think about free vs. dollar stock sites. Do you find them helpful? Would you, or do you, use dollar sites?