Halloween Design – 35 Last-Minute Resources for Graphic Designers

So October 31st is coming closer and so are the yearly obligations for graphic designers. Ah yes, Halloween design – how much we love this time of the year! Friends call and ask for Halloween invitations. Your client remembers that it’s only 10 days until he has to throw that party – and asks you to design some Halloween cards real quick. And have them printed yesterday please.

So where to go for all those clichés that people want in a Halloween design? Well, here comes Beeex.net, your collection of strictly free resources for graphic designers and web developers. And today, we have collected some great Halloween design resources for you. For that last-minute call for a professional Halloween graphic.

We have searched and listed a total of 35 Halloween design resources for the ambitioned designer: Halloween icons, Photoshop brushes, free Halloween vector art, and of course, free fonts. Some might want to rather refer to some of the features as “Halloween Clip Art” – that’s fine. Some graphic designers tend to turn up their noses at anything clipart in general – these are meant to inspire you, friends! So be nice.

We’ve also collected some Halloween ideas for you: Halloween wallpapers and backgrounds. You can either use these for inspiration, or to scary up your computer desktop.

And finally, we found some great Halloween tutorials for Photoshop, which will take you through the steps of designing some spooky Halloween invitations and cards.

So here goes: Let’s cut to the chase and come up with some great Halloween design today! Fire up Photoshop, fire up Illustrator, get creative!

Halloween Design

Please note the user license for each of the following design resources. While they are all free, some come with a restricted usage license – e.g. for commercial work. So before you download a resource, please read the license that is usually noted on the download page.

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Halloween Icons

Halloween icons that will make your desktop applications look really really scary. Make no mistake – don’t call this clip art. Halloween clip art is for milk drinkers. Halloween icons are for graphic desingers.

1/ Halloween Monsters

The nice people at Turbomilk have put together a great and very appealing set of cute little Halloween monsters. This Halloween clip art goes by the name of “monstroworld icons” and is intended to replace your usual desktop icons. And indeed, they look great! Go fetch these Halloween icons – for Mac OS X and Windows, or as PNG files – right here.

2/ Halloween Avatars/Smileys

Again, the word most suitable for these Halloween icons is “cute” rather than “scary”. Maybe “scary sweet”? At least that’s an alliteration. You can use these 20 nice, shiny and glossy 3D-style icons for anything you like, they come in GIF, ICO, and ICNS formats. Thanks to deleket on Deviant Art! Grab these Halloween icons here.

3/ Jack O’ Lantern & Harry Potter’s Hat

The Jack O’ Lantern is an American tradition and belongs in your window when the kids arrive, or they will make you suffer for your ignorance. Unless you have Harry Potter by your side to wave his magic wand at them and turn them into Jack O’ Lanterns themselves. With this free icon pack, you have both: download it here from Icon Drawer (you have to scroll down on the page a bit).

4/ Bloody Halloween Icons

These are actually two sets of bloody Halloween icons – one contains such things as knives, both with blood splatters on them and without, and the other spoils us with the Halloween mask from Scary Movie. Or was it Scream? Either way, you can find both free icon sets on this page.

5/ Halloween Icons Collection by The Iconfactory

These are five different sets of Halloween icons made by the Icon factory (a great site!). You have to click on each of the above 5 thumbnails to go to these pages. They are named as follows:
1/ Spooky Halloween Stickers (pumpkin),
2/ World of Aqua – After Dark (black cat),
3/ Vintage Halloween (scary masks),
4/ Glossy Halloween Food (pumpkin),
5/ Haunted Hard Drives (haunted hard drive).
Great addition to our Halloween design freebies by The Iconfactory. Check them out!

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Halloween Photoshop Brushes

This is a great addition to our Photoshop brushes category! We have collected these really nice design brushes for Photoshop – all ready for free download and, of course, spooky spooky. Just the right Halloween stuff for you.

6/ Horror Photoshop Brushes

Want to hang someone? Maybe place them in a scary horror ambient surrounding, along with a skull or two? Download these free Photoshop Halloween brushes by Emma Alvarez and you’re set.

7/ Assorted Halloween Brushes

A set of quite pessimistic Photoshop Halloween brushes is featured on Brusheezy. Very R.I.P. style. Download this set here.

8/ Vintage Halloween Brushes

A nice set of vintage Halloween brushes arrives from 500ml brushes. We gave you free vintage textures earlier, and this Photoshop brush kit is a great addition – especially since it’s Halloween themed! You can go there here.

9/ Zombie Photoshop Brushes

Zombies! Aaah! Halloween. Ah. Nuff said – go get ‘em.

10/ Photoshop Spider Brushes

Thanks to the graphic designer Scully, we are blessed with these wonderful creatures in the form of dedicated Photoshop Brushes. We are on our knees – you can download this set here.

11/ Cobweb Photoshop Brushes

It is only logical to also feature cobwebs now. Because – since we are so much in love with Halloween, we simply can’t get around it. You can download these Photoshop brushes here.

12/ Deathbat Photoshop Brushes

What’s a deathbat? Simple – a bat with a skull as its head. Or, from the skull’s perspective which we don’t want to neglect, a deathbat is a flying skull with bat wings. So here come some great Photoshop deathbat Brushes for you, perfect for Halloween! Download them here (thanks RiseAboveArt).

13/ Cliché Halloween Photoshop Brushes

These Photoshop brushes are great for various Halloween designs, as the set contains a lot of clichés – and that’s what the people want, isn’t it? Download it here (thanks to Anodyne).

14/ Eerie Photoshop Brushes

A wonderful set that goes well with that love serenade you plan to sing to your beloved one. Really. This Photoshop brush set includes a full moon, gravestones, and more cute things for your Halloween design. Download it here (thanks to wyckedBrush)

15/ Old City Photoshop Brushes

Ruins deluxe – this Photoshop brush pack gives you the ability to use dark buildings and places in your Halloween invitations. Go for it here.

16/ Spooky Halloween Design Brushes

This is a Photoshop Brush set by the same author as #15 – this time, Anodyne designed a pack of spooky Photoshop Halloween design brushes for use in your artwork. Great stuff, download it here.

17/ Devil Wings for Halloween

Above, we had the deathbats – now it’s time for the deathbat’s uncle, the devil himself. Or herself. Depends on your view of things. Nevermind our joking – these Photoshop brushes are perfect for Halloween! Download them here (thanks to austral-azn).

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Free Halloween Vector Art

We love free vectors. And we know you love them too! So of course we have to feature some great free Halloween vector art graphics for free download, and ready to use in your designs. Here they come.

18/ Free Vector Skulls

These are some very cool free vector skulls that fit perfectly with any Halloween design. Since they come as vector art, you can of course enlarge them and cover your house up with the printout. Provided you have a decent sized piece of paper handy. Thanks to Ben from Benblogged for these – go to his download page here!

19/ Free Vector Vintage

This is a nice set of free vector vintage art for use with Adobe Illustrator (or any other vector application). The free download includes skulls, wings, splatters, and even swirls and swooshes that actually fit quite well with a vintage Halloween design. Go check these free vectors out here.

20/ Free Halloween Vectors

A nice little set of three free vector graphics can be found over at Vecteezy. These free Halloween vectors consist of a witch hat and two carved pumpkins – one glowing, one in its natural form. Well, if you consider Jack O’ Lantern natural, that is. You can download this kit here.

21/ Free Vector Zombies

A nice set of free vector zombies, perfect for Halloween, that are rather funny than anything else. They are by Benblogged, and you can download them here.

22/ Free Vector Silhouettes

Another free vector pack by Ben, also for Halloween, only this time the zombies are silhouettes. Very nice work – you can use them for Halloween backgrounds, for instance. Download these free vectors here.

23/ Free Vector Zombie Heads

Zombies rock. That’s why we feature yet another free vector art pack of them; this time, they are the heads only. Really scary, and just perfect for any Halloween design you could imagine. Check this one out here (thanks to Spoongraphics).

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Free Halloween Fonts

Free fonts have a tradition here at Beeex.net. One of our earliest successful posts was about free pixel fonts, which we featured for direct download – go check it out if you haven’t yet! And today, we’ve got some great free Halloween font collections for you. So you’ll find multiple – read trunkload full of – free fonts for Halloween and other scary occasions on the following sites.

24/ Free Halloween Fonts at Urban Fonts

Urban Fonts has a collection of free Halloween fonts that come as dingbats. So you won’t be able to write anything with them, but if you use Adobe Illustrator, you can use these free fonts to make paths and then use the illustrations as vector graphics! Just a thought. Check out this nice collection of free Halloween fonts on this page.

25/ Free Horror Fonts

You may know DaFont already – they are a great site for free fonts. So here’s their collection of free horror fonts that work wonders when creating Halloween designs. The horror font section on DaFont can be found here, and then you might also want to check out their free Halloween fonts – go there here!

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Halloween Wallpapers and Pictures

So you are in need of some inspiration. Look no further, but stick with us. We have a few cool free Halloween wallpapers for you, along with a few free Halloween pictures that you can use in your Halloween designs.

26/ Grim Reaper

A classic. What is a Halloween without the grim reaper? Christmas! So here you get a huge-sized image of a grim reaper for use in your Halloween design. You can go to the page here (thanks to mjranum).

27/ Black Crows (PSD)

This is a free hi-res Photoshop image of four black crows by CatONineTales on DeviantArt. You can use the birds in your Halloween design to provide that certain dark feeling… You know. Download this PSD right here.

28/ Scary Halloween Wallpaper

These are two scary Halloween wallpapers for your computer desktop that look great – and can give your inspiration that push it needed very desperately. These desktop wallpapers over at GoMedia can be found at the bottom of this page – at the top, you’ll also find a free vector Halloween pack!

29/ Halloween Wallpaper

A great set of free Halloween wallpapers can be found here. Your desktop will never look the same! You can go see for yourself – and download – right here.

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Halloween Photoshop Tutorials (and Illustrator)

And finally, after all these freebies, here’s the section that will teach you how to create your own Halloween pictures. Learn how to make something ugly out of something beautiful, if you want to call it that way. These Halloween Photoshop tutorials will show you how! Watch out for the occasional Illustrator tutorial as well.

30/ Illustrator Tutorial – Create a Halloween Pumpkin

In this Illustrator tutorial by Nick La, you’ll learn how easy it actually is to create a vector pumpkin in Adobe Illustrator. The result can be seen above – and you can visit this Halloween tutorial right here.

31/ Halloween Pumpkin Photoshop Tutorial

And while we’re at it, why not see what we can do in good old Adobe Photoshop. This Halloween pumpkin Photoshop tutorial shows you how to make a very evil Jack O’ Lantern in your favorite design application. Go to this tutorial here.

32/ Halloween Photoshop Tutorial – Create a Zombie

In this Halloween Photoshop tutorial, you take any picture (of yourself, or of your beloved ones) and turn it into a horror image of a zombie. You’ll be using some interesting Photoshop techniques, so be sure to check this one out. Right here.

33/ Photoshop Tutorial – Old Face

Take a picture of a beautiful young woman and turn it into a cracked, old, peely artwork – that’s exactly what this Photoshop tutorial does. You can learn some great techniques here. Go see for yourself right here.

34/ Photoshop Tutorial – Portrait to Stone Statue

Take a portrait and turn it into a stone statue – that’s what this Photoshop tutorial is about. Again, a wonderful addition to any Halloween design! Go see this tutorial here.

35/ Photoshop Tutorial – Charming Landscape to Horror Site

And finally, one of the best photo manipulation tutorials for Photoshop that we didn’t want to leave out of this list for Halloween design. Learn how to turn a charming landscape image into a charming horror site – you can find this Photoshop tutorial here (it has been featured on Beeex.net before).

There you have it, our shortlist of 35 designer resources for Halloween design. Halloween icons, Halloween clip art, Halloween Photoshop brushes, free Halloween vectors, Halloween wallpapers, and finally, Halloween Photoshop tutorials. What a mouthful. We can’t say this word anymore today.

Hopefully, you find these resources useful. We would love to hear back from you – leave us a comment if you like!

So long – and: booooooooo! -
~Beeex Happy Team