License-checked free design assets for client work

Every asset below passed a license check before it went onto a real client site. Two of them run on this one: Lucide for the icons, and Kenney's Food Kit and Car Kit for the 3D. Read the two rules at the end before you ship anything from it.

Icons

• Lucide (lucide.dev): ISC license. My default for interface icons, with a consistent stroke, a large set and a first-class React package. This site runs on it.
• Phosphor (phosphoricons.com): MIT. Six weights from thin to duotone, useful when a brand needs a softer or heavier voice than Lucide.
• Tabler Icons (tabler.io/icons): MIT. More than 5,000 icons aligned to a pixel grid, strong on dashboard and dev-tool glyphs.
• Iconoir (iconoir.com): MIT. A distinctive rounded style for when you do not want to 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 covering food, vehicles and furniture. Tiny files, no attribution required. I used the Food Kit and Car Kit on this site.
• Quaternius (quaternius.com): CC0. Low-poly packs ready in GLB, a good complement to Kenney.
• 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 market of models and HDRIs.
• Sketchfab (sketchfab.com): license set per model. A huge catalog, so always filter by CC0 or CC-BY, and keep the attribution on CC-BY models.

Before any model goes near a browser, run it through npx @gltf-transform/cli optimize. Textures at 512px are enough for most web scenes.

Photos

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

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

Fonts

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

Use two families per site at most, one for display and one for text.

UI components and code

• shadcn/ui (ui.shadcn.com): MIT. Copy-in components on accessible Radix primitives, and the default I start from.
• reactbits.dev: MIT with Commons Clause. Free in any site, commercial work included, but you cannot resell the components themselves. Read that clause before you build 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, so go to the actual repository or license page. CC0 means you can do anything; CC-BY means you credit visibly; MIT means you keep the copyright notice in your source.

Rule 2: keep a record. Add one markdown file to the repo that lists every external asset, its source and its license. It takes five minutes, and when a client asks about licensing, the answer is a copy-paste. This guide started as exactly that file.