If you are an entrepreneur or a marketer, this post is about a few graphic design tools that you can easily use.
Not everyone knows how to use Industry-leading products such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
Yet, visuals rule the web.
You’d need tons of visuals for all sorts of content – say blog posts, social media updates, email marketing, and other documents you’d want to create including eBooks, whitepapers, and others.
You’d also need graphics, icons, and illustrations for various parts of your website.
Marketers will also need easy to use tools for creating advertisements, banners, and other such digital assets.
For marketers and time-strapped business owners, fiddling with Photoshop isn’t an option. Here’s a rundown of tools you can use
Canva
Canva has soon emerged as the leading tool to create a wide array of graphics for the web.
From Facebook cover photos to Twitter updates, and from Infographics to invitation posters, Canva has most things covered. Featuring a drag and drop functionality along with an ever-growing repository of images, vectors, and icons, doing graphics with Canva is as easy as using your mouse.
I predominantly use Canva (and Visme — see below) and I really don’t know how I’d manage without this.
Canva now has templates for paid ads (Google, Facebook, Quora, and others). Canva also has templates for posters, printables, social media ads, presentations, eBook covers, regular book cover design, and now also has video-enabled presentation decks (Similar to Visme Production Studio).
Read:
Visme
Visme helps you create all sorts of visuals for the web (including pitch decks, presentations, and more).
Unlike a lot of other tools on this list, Visme also helps you collect leads with Visme forms (attached to some of the visual projects that you share on your blog or elsewhere).
With Visme, you can create Video/GIFs, infographics, social media graphics, social ads, printables, documents, and so much more.
As on 2021, you can create the following with Visme:
Branded Templates
Charts and graphs
videos (including virtual video presentations)
Social media graphics, mockups, & infographics
Presentations, and more.
With Visme, you also get icons, photos, integrations, flowcharts, collaborations, animations, and interactions along with the newly launched Presenter Studio.
Bannersnack
If you are a marketer looking to create ads and banners, look no further than BannerSnack.
Pick up templates for your ads or banners and drag/drop objects to create your ads quickly and efficiently.
You can use the free library of images and assets or bring in images from the Creative commons.
Note: As of 2021, BannerSnack is still available but will slowly phase out to Creatopy — a comprehensive ad creation, ad automation, and ad delivery solution.
Serif Pageplus
Serif’s PagePlus is the only tool that you’d have to download – yeah, the good, old downloadable software – but it’s well worth the effort if you’d like to create documents of any sort.
Go ahead and create Brochures, postcards, ePuB covers, Kindle Book Covers, flyers, and possibly every other document you’d ever need for your business.
Affinity Designer for Mac
One of the best apps on the Mac Store for art and design, Affinity Designer for Mac helps you develop designs really fast.
Zoom off at about 60 fps, apply effects in real-time, and work with objects and graphics as complex as you like while Affinity never runs out of memory or the capability to handle tasks.
Design Rails (Beta)
Need a logo real quick? How about minutes instead of days or weeks? And get this: how about a logo at no cost to you?
Design Rails is a cool app that taps into its database of varied iconography, typefaces, color schemes, and layout styles to get you the logo that you are likely to fall in love with.
WithOomph
WithOomph – reminds us of Social Oomph – is another cool discovery for getting your logo done with nothing but a business/brand name and a keyword.
If you do like one of those logos that come out, almost instantly, you may purchase your logo files (PNG, PDF, and EPS) for a mere £25.
They also have screen-printing and other printing options available.
Sta.Sh Muro by Deviant Art
Imagine getting to a URL and getting almost anything done in terms of graphic design? How about some quick photo editing?
Instead of waiting for Photoshop to load forever for quick edits, you might as well use Sta.sh Muro by Deviant Art. We haven’t used this one yet (so your feedback is welcome).
WordSwag
Think of WordSwag as a graphic designer in your pocket, at the palm of your hand.
Available as an App in the iTunes Store, WordSwag has more than 290,000 images (sourced through Pixabay).
Create your visuals quickly, add image filters if you need to, pick your own backgrounds, add text, and share on social when you are done.
PicMonkey
PicMonkey lets you edit and touch up photos, design visuals, and create a collage if you like to.
Turn photos into illustrations, use text masks to combine images with text, and even go retro if you like. A pro version is available for ads-free editing and more features.
DesignContest
Graphics — everything Logo to package design; from corporate identity to social media graphics — are critical for your branding.
But not every business owner has an eye for detail or the creativity to see their logo or branding ideas come to life.
Despite having these graphic design tools at disposal, there are several instances when you might want to consider something like Crowd souring your Logo design.
DesignContest — as the name suggests — delivers a branded, customized, and beautiful logo — by making several designers compete with each other to get you the best logo design possible.
Which of these tools do you use? Do you know of any other graphic design tools for non-designers that business owners and marketers can use?