Be it for business capital, creative assistance, or remote collaboration, when you are managing a challenging graphic designing venture, it’s best to get as much help as you could from the outside.
And, because graphic designing might sometimes need software that pushes your device too hard, bringing in some lean online tools to quicken the pace of designing tasks can’t possibly go wrong. Such tools can come in handy when you are aiming to reduce expenditure over expensive, subscription-based designing tools.
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So, here are the best online visual design tools used by even the top graphic designers for making their jobs as easy and quick as possible. Some are paid, some are free, but all of them provide value.
Pricing: Free/Paid
Founded in 2012, this drag-and-drop, cloud-based, graphic design software offers many of the graphic creation and photo editing services for free. You can design graphics related to social media, business presentations, documents, and other visual content for both personal and enterprise purposes using Canva.
And, if you have some change to spare, you could opt for its premium features too.
The learning curve is not steep, and the designing process is as easy as drawing a picture in MS Paint. You can create graphics from scratch or choose from a host of templates to save your time. Once you’re done with your graphics, you can download them in formats such as PDF, GIF, SVG, JPG, etc.
Real-time collaboration is another important feature that makes this tool beneficial for design teams. You can use real-time editing to see what changes others are making to your graphics as you continue to contribute on your part too.
Pricing: Free/Paid
The headline on Stencil’s home page reads, “Easy-to-use graphic design tool for bloggers, business owners, and social media marketers”.
This pretty much defines the utility and scope of this cloud-based graphic design tool. You can use it to create banners, icons, templates, and quotes. Stencil, too, comes with real-time collaboration and could be used effectively by teams of various sizes.
The free package has many features but might feel a little limited when you compare it with the paid ones. Unlike Canva, which offers unlimited designs and downloads in the free package itself, Stencil’s free version only offers uploads up to 50 images, 10 collections, and the option to keep up to 10 favorites.
One interesting feature of Stencil is Instagram SMS, wherein you can send your created designs to your mobiles and then upload them directly to Instagram.
Pricing: Free
Read any review — good or bad — about Giphy, and you'll find that they all have one thing in common i.e., they all agree that it’s FUN.
Not your typical graphic design ‘software’ for small or big businesses, Giphy is an online GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) library favored by graphic designers of all tastes and has the ease that would make the graphic design all 'perky' to you. And that’s for one simple reason: gifs are consumed way too much on social media.
You can use this platform to upload or download gifs that suit your marketing or advertising needs the best, and use them anywhere you want. You get to enjoy this service without paying a single dime out of your pocket.
Pricing: Paid
Getting back to typical graphic design software for business, PicMonkey is another photo-editing and design software used for creating banners, thumbnails, logos, etc., for all your social media activities.
Headquartered in Washington since 2012, it's a lean, cloud-based service, which means you won’t be needing the best business laptop for graphic design to handle the whims of its graphic design engines. The graphics and tools library are really content-rich and the editor is drag-and-drop based so the learning curve is quite flat.
The subscribers of this tool can work in a shared workspace, where they can send invites asking other team members to inspect and edit designs in real-time.
However, there are is a bummer in using this application —the free trial is very limited, and you can’t download your graphics in this version. But this limitation can be easily overcome by using its mobile application.
Stock content providers are not just spaces limited to providing you design ideas and stock content. For times when you are feeling like giving back to the design community, you can share your images and other graphics too, so that the community could benefit from your contribution.
These could be a part of your marketing strategy, where you upload your designs with your brand’s name and ask for a backlink in return instead of money.
Hope you got your answer to what are the top graphic design software of the industry. In case you didn’t find your favorite tools in the list, let us know in the comments and it will be added.