Give Your Designs a Bright Summer Vibe with Free Summer Border Clip Art

Summer is a season full of fun, warmth, and vibrancy. As a designer, you can capture the essence of summer in your projects by using summer border clip art. Borders are a great way to frame images and add some personality to your designs. With the right summer border, you can make your designs pop!

In this article, we’ll look at some of the best places to find free summer border clip art and the types of borders you can use to give your work that bright, cheerful summer vibe.

Why Use Summer Border Clip Art?

Summer border clip art is a fun and easy way to make your designs feel more in tune with the summer season Here are some of the benefits of using summer borders

• Sets a summer mood Borders featuring summer elements like flowers fruits palm trees, beaches, and sunshine can instantly evoke a summery feeling. This allows you to set the scene without having to incorporate summer themes throughout the entire design.

• Adds vibrancy The bright colors and whimsical shapes often used in summer border clip art adds excitement and vibrancy to designs. This livens up layouts that might otherwise feel mundane

• Provides versatility: Borders come in different sizes, shapes, and orientations, giving you options for framing images in a customized way. You can find borders that are horizontal, vertical, wavy, circular, and more.

• Saves time: Searching for quality border clip art is much faster than creating a border completely from scratch. Summer borders provide an instant dose of summer flair.

• Free to use: Unlike stock photos and illustrations, borders tend to be available to download and use for free more often. This allows you to add summer vibes without eating into your design budget.

With all these benefits, it’s easy to see why summer border clip art can be a designer’s secret weapon for creating seasonal projects full of personality.

Places to Find Quality Summer Border Clip Art

Fortunately, there are lots of great resources online to find summer border clip art for free. Here are some top picks:

Freepik

With over 4 million free vectors, PSDs, icons, and illustrations, Freepik is one of the best one-stop shops for all types of design resources. Freepik has an entire category dedicated to summer borders featuring over 1700 options.

You can find bright, colorful summer borders depicting flowers, leaves, fruit, beaches, sunshine, and other summery themes. The summer border collection also includes some more generic styles like watercolor splashes that could work for a variety of seasonal projects.

Most of the summer borders on Freepik are available with no attribution required. They also indicate the file format (EPS, PNG, SVG, etc.) so you can easily find a border that will work with your software.

Pixabay

Pixabay is another expansive free image database with over 2 million STK images and illustrations available. Searching for “summer borders” on Pixabay brings up over 550 border options to choose from.

The summer borders here feel a bit more cartoonish and playful. You’ll find lots of fun designs featuring ice cream cones, sunglasses, beach scenes, watermelons, and flamingos. There are also some more elegant floral borders mixed in as well.

Nearly all of these summer borders can be used without attribution. And if you want to edit or resize them, you can download the vectors for free too.

iStock (With Free Trial)

iStock is best known as a paid stock image site. But they do offer a one-month free trial for new users, allowing you to download up to 10 free images, vectors, or illustrations.

This free trial is a great way to grab a few high-quality summer borders without paying. iStock has over 280,000 summer border illustrations with a mix of styles ranging from minimalist to maximalist.

Even once the trial is over, iStock can still be worthwhile for borders since their credits tend to go farther for simpler graphics compared to photos.

Canva

Canva doesn’t have dedicated borders, but it does have over 25,000 design elements you can use to create your own borders. Simply search for terms like “summer”, “floral”, or “tropical” to find flowers, leaves, shapes, and illustrations to assemble into a customized border.

Canva’s elements work especially well for creating geometric patterns or repetitive borders. And if you pair them with Canva’s grid overlay, it’s easy to line everything up cleanly. With a free Canva account, you can access all of these elements to experiment with border designs.

Types of Summer Borders to Use in Your Designs

Summer borders come in lots of different sizes, configurations, and art styles. Here are some of the most popular types of summer borders to try in your projects:

Floral Borders

Floral borders featuring bright flowers and greenery evoke the feeling of summer instantly. Try using floral borders on wedding invitations, graduation announcements, or any design where you want to convey celebration and warmth.

Popular floral border motifs include roses, daisies, poppies, and tropical flowers like hibiscus, palm fronds, and monstera leaves.

Watercolor Borders

Watercolor-style borders have a more artistic, hand-painted look. The softer blending of colors and bleeding edges create a dreamy, tranquil mood.

These watercolor summer borders work nicely for photo frames, stationery, social media headers, bulletin boards, and youth-oriented designs. Keep them simple with washes of yellow, pink, and blue.

Fruit or Food Borders

What says summer more than juicy watermelons, sweet berries, and beachy cocktails? Use borders with fruit, ice cream cones, and refreshments for an edible summer vibe.

These food-inspired borders look cute on party invitations, menus, recipe cards, and designs for cafes or restaurants. Outline the images with a bright color for definition.

Beach and Ocean Borders

Bring the sights of summer vacation into designs with beach and ocean borders. Headers with palm trees, shells, starfish, and ocean waves evoke tropical getaways and fun in the sun.

Use beach borders for travel agency projects, resort marketing materials, or summer event announcements. Add a stylized sunburst in the corner to complete the look.

Geometric Borders

For a more minimalist style, try summer borders with colorful geometric shapes and lines. Triangles, circles, squiggly lines, and irregular shapes create movement.

Geometric borders have a modern, youthful energy perfect for music festival branding, sports camps, and outdoor concerts. Let the shapes overlap each other to form new patterns.

Final Tips for Using Summer Border Clip Art

As you search for and download free summer borders, keep these last tips in mind:

• Match colors carefully – The hues in a border should complement the other colors in your design rather than clashing. Orange and blue or pink and green are foolproof summer color combos.

• Scale proportionally – When resizing borders, hold down the Shift key to keep the proportions constrained so the shapes don’t warp and stretch.

• Credit properly – If a border requires attribution, be sure to give credit appropriately on your final designs, whether it’s a website link or creator’s name.

• Simplify if needed – Some borders are very ornate. You can use clipping masks in Photoshop or vector software to delete sections and simplify if desired.

• Save PNG with transparency – borders look best saved as PNG files with transparent backgrounds rather than JPG files with solid white backgrounds.

With quality summer border clip art, it’s easy to add a festive seasonal flair to designs for branding, events, crafts, stationery, and more. Use the free border resources in this article to access hundreds of summer borders to make your projects shine!