Professionals will tell you that impactful infographics can only be created by skilled graphic designers. But here’s the problem – graphic design is a no-joke skill and can be very intimidating to those who have no background in photography or design. Some businesses even prefer to outsource professional designers to produce outstanding visuals for marketing purposes. The good news is that you don’t need to be an expert to achieve this.
Even if you aren’t great at matching typefaces or choosing harmonious color palettes, there is a universe of easy-to-use graphic design tools that can help you to awaken your inner artist. Here are the five best free and premium graphic design tools for non-designers that are easy to use.
1. Canva
When it comes to the best graphic design tools for non-designers, Canva rules. This free to use program offers hundreds of document templates and millions of images to choose from. For beginners, Canva offers a great entry point. It combines an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface with professional level editing, thereby making it easy to create everything from simple header images to infographics.
Besides letting you create your own visuals, Canva also has a design school where you can learn tips on how to create outstanding visuals. With Canva, you can create flyers, graphics for your blog, header images, social media banners, and infographics.
The program also hosts a large collection of images and fonts to choose from. While most features and images are free, there are premium options that can be purchased at an affordable cost. The premium plans start at $12.95 per month.
2. Stencil
If your goal is to increase prospect engagement on social media, then you will need Stencil in your marketing toolkit. Stencil has established a name for itself in this particular niche and exists to help non-designers create content marketing images, ad graphics, and social media posts that boost social engagement.
Stencil boasts of over 1.4 million background photos plus hundreds of weekly additions and over 650 design templates ready to be customized. It also includes various font styling options and a magic resize to optimize for different platforms.
This program also comes with a myriad of image-editing capabilities that have helped businesses earn 84% more clicks, according to a Kissmetrics survey. The program has a free and a paid version. The free version limits you to ten images per month, limited icons, and background. You can upgrade to the Pro version at $9 per month to lift the limitations.
3. Crello
Crello is a top-rated free graphic design tool that helps to create stunning images for print, social media, and other web-based graphics. It comes loaded with thirty-three different formats and over 10,000 free and ready-to-use templates for creating professional-grade designs.
The templates are grouped by size so you’ll always find a template that is optimized for your target platform. Whether you want templates for social media, posters, flyers, cards, or even blogs, Crello has them ready and designed for the common dimensions.
Once you’ve chosen a template, you can either start from scratch or use the typefaces selected by Crello’s designers. Its clean interface allows you to customize your template with new backgrounds, icons, stickers, borders, different styles of text and more. You can then search through their 65-million image library for free and $0.99 photos to use as the backdrop for your design.
4. Piktochart
Piktochart is an intuitive, cloud-based infographic solution that provides its users with unlimited design capabilities. This tool is easy to use and requires no prior experience to create professional-grade infographics. Just pick a template from a large library of over 600 professionally designed infographic, presentation, and print templates.
Once you’ve chosen a template, Piktochart provides you with dozens of beautiful interactive charts, images, animated icons, and videos to add to your presentation. You can then move things around, change colors, or edit fonts right within their intuitive drag-and-drop editor to give your story the visual impact it deserves.
As the best graphic design tool for creating infographics, Piktochart includes eleven different chart types that you can create from within. You can even import an Excel file with data on it and add it to your presentation. Better even, you can download your graphics as either PDFs, PNGs, JPEGs, or HTML. Piktochart offers a free and a paid version. The paid version offers more templates and costs $15 per month.
5. Snappa
Snappa is a quick and easy browser-based tool that simplifies your work every step of the way. It starts by giving you the perfect image dimensions for various platforms, something you won’t find in any other program. It displays image dimensions for emails, blogs, display ads, infographics and social media as clickable presets.
Once you get the perfect dimensions, it gives you the option to choose from hundreds of professionally-made templates. You don’t have to start from scratch! Snappa then gives you access to a wide library of over 500,000 high-resolution free stock photos to choose from.
And if you want to add text, graphics, and effects to your photos, Snappa has them too. You can choose from over 70,000 vectors and shapes and over 200 fonts. This way Snappa gives you all the customization options you need to give your photos a final touch. It comes with a free version and paid versions that start from $10 per month.
Wrapping Up
Gone are the days when graphic design work was only done by highly trained professionals. Today the Internet has made it possible for all visual marketing work to be done by everyone, regardless of one’s skill set. There’s no longer a need to outsource or hire professional graphic designers. You just need the right tool to create attractive visuals and infographics that will earn you more clicks.
Have you used any of the above graphic design tools for non-designers? Share your experiences with us in the comments section below.
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