617 free digital design assets you can reuse (created by charities)

Yes, it’s true. There are 617 here for you to reuse. This blog explains what design assets are, where they came from and how to use them.

Design assets are…

Things made by a digital project - from research insights, to lists of user needs, to journey maps, to code used to build a solution.

Free to use

Yes, they are free to use. You do not need to ask for permission. All the work is licensed under a ‘Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License’. This is an international standard in sharing material and is used across all sectors and industries. Its terms also include attributing credit where you have reused something.

Created by 122 charities and agencies on Catalyst programmes

All assets were created between November 2020 and May 2021 by charities and agencies funded to run digital projects. They were funded by the Catalyst and National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Response fund. Making their work open for others to reuse was a condition specified by the funder.

Open working and reuse are part of a big push we have made at Catalyst to improve how charities share their work. Open working has benefits for everyone.

Types of design assets

• ‍Playback decks - overview of the project, including different things they did, learned or made along the way
• ‍Specific design outputs - like personas and user need statements, even some prototypes you can try or use
• ‍Writing about their work - what they did and what they learnt, written in real time. Lots of people did this on the Catalyst Medium publication (there were 184 weeknotes - approximately 90,000 words! - published between February and May 2021)
• ‍Programme delivery assets - created by digital agencies working with groups of charities
• ‍Code is also available for any project that created something with code. Just ask us.
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You can copy, reuse and remix

It’s up to you how you use the things others made. You might build on it for your own service, use it to move faster on your project, or give it to your digital partner as a starting point for discussion.

You can use all of something or just part of it. 

If you publish it, please give credit to who made it.

How to find and search assets

Option 1

Visit the Catalyst reuse page.

Scroll down to browse assets and get a feel for what was made. 

Search for any words on the page by pressing Ctrl+F (PC) or Cmd+F (Mac) or using the find in page function (mobile browsers). Try searching for 'universal credit' or 'wellbeing' or 'research' or 'user need', for example.

Option 2

Search an Airtable spreadsheet of all assets listed on the reuse page.

Upgrades and a new open working toolkit coming soon

We’re working to put all assets into a more searchable resource hub. We’re doing this to make them easier to search and so they can be added to. We want to support more open working across the sector. We want charities to share more. We want there to be more everyone can reuse.

We’re also creating an open working toolkit to help anyone (charity, agency or funder) work more openly in the future. This will be live in a couple of weeks. We will write about it here.