Every spring, the same thing happens. Designers and makers start searching for vintage florals, Easter illustrations, antique frames, the kind of assets that make a card or a label look genuinely considered rather than assembled in five minutes. The problem is finding good ones. Most of what’s out there is either low-resolution clip art or AI-generated fluff.

So we’ve put together a free Spring Design Kit from the members-only Century Library archives. Thirty-Six curated vintage illustrations, five borders, five backgrounds/patterns and two fonts. Everything you need to build something properly beautiful for Easter and spring. It’s the kind of material that takes time to source well, and we’ve done that work for you.

What’s in the kit

Everything in this kit is sourced from the Century Library archives; Real vintage design assets made from original scans of our antique books, botanical journals, and historical print collections. Nothing generated and nothing generic.

36 Vintage Spring and Easter illustrations

A hand-picked selection spanning Victorian botanical png’s, antique animal illustrations, 1920’s lineart, and our personal favorites; A selection of Kate Greenaway children’s book illustrations. The Kate Greenaway collection is one of the most beautiful things in the library. Delicate, warm, and unmistakably spring!

5 Vintage Borders and Frames

Five borders chosen specifically to work with Spring and Easter content. A good mix of styles, and oozing with character! All in the PNG format – so changing colors and layering them on different backgrounds is super easy.

Tip for Canva users: You can change the color of a PNG image by selecting the image and choosing the ‘Duo Tone’ image effect.

2 Spring Themed Antique Fonts

Both of these featured in our spring edition font carousel on Instagram, and both are built specifically for heritage and artisan design work.

CL Antique No.80 is a highly decorative uppercase font where each letterform is built from twisting vines and tiny leaves, creating an intricate organic look!

CL Antique No.81 is a decorative uppercase typeface where each letter is constructed from rough twigs wrapped with small curling vines, creating an organic, rustic look.

Last but not least, 5 backgrounds

No kit is complete without backgrounds – these are the icing on the cake (and stupidly high-resolution!)

A few things worth knowing before you use the assets

Print at 300dpi minimum: Anything lower and the fine linework in the engravings starts to pixelate. All kit assets are sized for this, but worth checking your export settings before sending to print.

Cream or off-white backgrounds, not pure white: Vintage illustrations sit on warm backgrounds. Pure white makes them look like they’ve been cut and pasted from a medical textbook. Even a very slight cream tint changes everything.

For the fonts: Install both before opening your design software. They are standard OTF files. Drop them into your system fonts folder and they’ll appear in Photoshop, Illustrator, and everything else within a restart. (Canva Pro is required to upload custom fonts)

If you want to go further than the kit, the full Century Library archive has 100,000+ vintage assets across animals, botanicals, vintage fonts, and so much more. Members get unlimited downloads and this kit is a teeny-tiny taster!