Need Help Free sites for vector graphics

There are a number of sites that you can download vector graphics from (Brands of the World™ comes to mind), but they are not free. Their use is governed by the licensing agreement of the copyright holder. Today, with reverse image searches, copyright violators are being caught in record numbers (there are firms that will search for intellectual property owners and take a % of the proceeds). Fines and penalties are high, especially for professional printers (kids and hobbyists will generally just get a "cease and desist" letter).

Some brands (Harley-Davidson comes to mind), are almost maniacal in their fervor to track down violators (but it is important to remember that Harley makes almost $100 million a year licensing their trademarks for T-shirts, posters, keychains, coffee mugs and the like).

Your best bet is to use original art as much as possible, and resort to clip art only as needed. Copyrighted intellectual property (product logos and trademarks) should only be used after securing permission from the company that owns the property. Their art departments will usually send you authorized vector files if the use is considered legitimate and is in their best interests.

 

The Brands of the World web site is not the place anyone should be going to get vector files of corporate brand artwork. Far too often the logos uploaded to that site are fanboy re-creations rather than legit artwork. Some of the efforts are good while others are just laughably BAD. Anyone in a rush will be far better off skimming the Internet for corporate PDFs that contain the desired logo rather than visiting a suspect logo collection web site.

Many of the logos carried at Brands of the World, or other similar web sites, may be out of date versions. I'm pretty sure the web site doesn't have a large enough admin staff to be able to police the logos being uploaded, much less place a priority on the most current version of a brand.

Most important the logos at Brands of the World don't come with any color specifications or brand use guidelines. Every major brand has a guideline book whose rules must be followed -rules like minimum clear space around the logo or no stupid squeezing or stretching of the logo.

More and more franchise owners of many companies, such as a Subway restaurant for instance, are required to have sign companies submit their drawings and even paperwork, in order to get updated street and building signage.

 

There aren’t any that are “free” in every sense of the word. A lot of the “free” sites aren’t for commercial use and you’ll get lawyered that way as per post #2.

even the free font sites such as dafont, 95% of those fonts are for personal use only and you need to email/contact the creator for the appropriate licence.

In short, nobody works for free with these sites. They’ll find a way to get paid.

 

All the legal reasons aside, its much easier to use a decent site and pay for what you need.

 

The fonts posted at the Font Squirrel web site are completely free for personal and commercial use. The same goes for the fonts posted at Google Fonts.

 

I've been using Shutterstock or Vectorstock for these types of graphics. I know there are others as well that are similar. Vectorstock is the cheapest but neither are free.

 

Don't know how the price compares to other sites, but we've been using imageclub10 and love it! It has a lot of sign/vehicle-specific artwork.

 

Look also: https://seeklogo.com/

 

vecteezy has some good free stuff. still, if you're a business making money off design then you should not be pulling crap off the internet to pass-off as your own. only a matter of time before you get hit, and free crap is crap nonetheless.

buy artwork packages from provehicleoutlines, or badwrap, or auroragraphics, or whatever your vinyl supplier may have to offer. its a few hundred bucks, and then you've got thousands of files to start your design process.

 

The Seek Logo web site is no better than Brands of the World. All of the same hazards are present (fanboy re-creations, out of date designs, no use guidelines, etc). If you're working on a legit project for any national company it is ALWAYS best to get the authentic artwork and use guidelines from them.

 

Get real fonts too. When people send you files or if you ever send them out, its a real PITA when all that you have are knockoffs

 

Some designers do this on purpose, using hard to find fonts or mixing two similar fonts in the same layout, making it that much harder
for other shops to copy their work.

 

It's easier and better from a licensing standpoint for the client to send you the artwork with any active type converted to outlines. It also avoids technical problems, such as fonts that are not cross platform compatible (such as the TTC files Apple uses for some of its system fonts). If they make you use a PDF with embedded fonts it's easy enough to use the Flatten Transparency trick in Adobe Illustrator to convert the embedded fonts to curves.

Regarding designers using certain fonts to trip up competitors, maybe some sign companies do that. If I'm concerned a prospective client is going to be shopping my sketches around to rival sign shops I'll make sure to rasterize anything in the PDFs (along with password protecting them). As far as using exotic fonts go, in my own case I try pretty hard to stay up to speed with the latest in typography trends as another means of keeping designs looking fresh. I'm always on the lookout for really good introductory bargains on new typeface releases. Some other typefaces go on sale from time to time. I jumped on a $79 sale of the entire Avenir Next Pro type family (that solves one of those Apple TTC problems). I'm usually getting at least a couple or so new type families per month that way. There's nothing stopping competitors from staying up to date with type trends and regularly investing in new fonts. But so many "designers" out there just like stretching and squeezing Arial into everything.

 

What about when the customer takes a picture of a sign you did for them and uses that? I don't see any reason to make it easy
on another shop to copy your work.

 

G

Judging by the 500 font ID requests a day that go through here, font ID software and the fact that most people are cool with close enough, I don't think that using knockoffs makes it any harder.

 

Most customers are okay with "close" on font matching work. But some tasks require things to be right on the money, such as replacing something like a damaged channel letter face. A typeface of a given name may have variants that are not identical to each other. For instance there's two different variants of Papyrus out there, the original one made by Letraset (the good one) and the ugly version often bundled in with MS Office (it has much smaller lowercase characters). Helvetica has multiple variants and not all of its "clones" (such as Bitstream's Swiss 721 or URW's Nimbus Sans) are identical.

If a customer takes a picture of a finished sign we already built for them and shows that image to a different sign company they really haven't done anything wrong. The situation is not an all cut-and-dry thing however. But normally if we create a design with a new logo we did in-house and the customer buys a substantial sign based on it, then builds his branding around it we normally sell them the rights to that logo as part of the sign deal.

Now if they decide they're going to open another location and have someone else make the signs, it's okay for them to provide logo files we gave/sold to them. But we don't have to provide the rival sign company with any of our original production files, specs, etc. We still retain a copyright on that stuff even if we sold a logo in the drawings.

 

For sure, but in the context of this thread, a new member is asking where to get free vectors and moved into fonts. I was simply suggesting to build a real font collection so that down the road, if they get to this point, they can properly do the work. It got off on a tangent but feel my point was correct.

 

+1 for Vecteezy