September 14, 2021
Graphic design is a critical element of marketing and brand development. Everything from your products to emails to social media posts require some element of graphic design, and yet it’s an area often taken for granted.
Bad graphic design can seriously harm your earning potential. Several studies have indicated that viewers rated well-designed websites as more trustworthy than poorly-designed websites. Further, brand recognition is directly correlated with good graphic design.
It ultimately pays to invest in good graphic design. However, as a small business, you still need to balance your budget to actually sustain the business; whereas large companies can simply hire highly experienced designers. This is where free online tools can level the playing field.
Check out the list below for our pick of amazing free design graphic design tools for non-designers, i.e. tools that will make designing a breeze.
Use Canva to design presentations, social media graphics, email headers, and more with thousands of beautiful layouts. Create professional, polished works even when you have zero experience as a graphic designer. Canva’s easy drag-and-drop tool and sample templates provides you with incredibly helpful guidelines to work from.
Color is a critical part of branding—you can’t picture major brands like McDonalds, Starbucks, or BMW without their iconic colors. Knowing this, many businesses hire professional designers to make incredibly calculated decisions when it comes to their brand’s color palette.
These professionals have years of experience in the area of color harmony and their psychological triggers, but enlisting their expertise can cost a pretty penny. That’s where Coolors comes in. Coolors is a free tool that allows you to upload any image for a corresponding color palette. The tool automatically samples colors in the image to create a corresponding harmonized color scheme. With you palette, you have the option of saving it as-is or adjusting it to your liking.
If you need graphic design and you need it fast, Klex is the platform for you. It offers a wide variety of templates, design assets, effects, and filters. The end result is clean and polished work, ready for publication.
Because of their convenience, infographics are one of the most popular tools for conveying ideas and information. They’re a fun, clear, and concise way to present information without boring the reader.
However, professional work can be costly due to software and talent. This is where Piktochart can help save the day. Piktochart provides you with ready-made templates and gives you the ability to easily input your own data, making infographics free and easy.
Pixlr enables you to edit photos with various effects, overlays, borders, and more. You can use the web app or upload and edit photos directly on your phone through the Pixlr mobile app.
Sumo Paint is a browser-based tool that enables you to create illustrations and cartoon images through brushes, pencils, gradients, shapes, and more. Like several of the examples listed above, Sumo Paint offers a free version as well as a paid version.