Graphic design software has gotten more affordable and easier to use. Read reviews of the best items for professional graphic designers, ideas to learn graphic design tools free online, and examples of great graphic designers’ work to inspire your own projects.
The right tools can make all the difference in your creative process, and we’ve got plenty of them here. Whether you’re looking for graphic design software for beginners or professional design tools free, these graphic design tools will help you create masterpieces.
ProofHub – Proofing tool
Designing teams are overloaded with creative work that includes discussions regarding the design, drafting the framework for the design, making changes and many other things to handle. The design you make will be checked at multiple levels before it gets final. And the whole process includes countless changes, several feedback and many things. So, the biggest challenge that comes for designers is proofing.
An online proofing tool like ProofHub for designing teams will help you manage all your tasks easily and hassle-free. The client can easily explain to you small changes like- Hey, shift this text here, or add color to this portion of the design. It eliminates the game of emails, feedback and approvals and reduces the time consumed for the entire process. With an online proofing tool like ProofHub, you can make changes in your file instantly, add comments, highlight the flaws in the design while keeping everyone in loop.
Pixlr
Pixlr is another image editing tool that’s often used for online graphic design. You can easily remove image backgrounds, add text and stickers to photos, and use simple filters like you’re on Instagram.
Like many of the online tools in this article, Pixlr also starts free. You can begin editing images, creating graphics, and building out your marketing collateral in minutes.
Price: Pixlr lets you start using the tool for free. Paid plans start at $4.90 per month, billed annually. Or you can grab the AppSumo lifetime deal of Pixlr at $49.
Adobe Photoshop
Launched in 1988, Photoshop has become a staple in the life of designers. Imagine a program to take your artistic style into a digital world with confidence, a program that compliments your artistic style. Photoshop is an extremely powerful program for creating prints and patterns to be the best you can be in the designing world. For graphic designers it has countless options, tools, and settings to open up new opportunities, to create design that is more authentic with proper guidance.
Photoshop for Designers allows you to:
- Build confidence in your design skills
- Enjoy the new insights
- Create digital artwork based off your drawings
- Learn from step-by-step instruction
- A wonderful way to learn and remember
- Speed up your design process
- Bring your ideas to life
- Stay motivated through daily emails and lessons
Canva
Canva is a popular online graphic design tool known and used by seasoned designers and amateurs alike. It has a drag-and-drop functionality, which makes it easy to learn and use.
Free versions of Canva also make it useful for people without a graphic design budget. If you prioritize simplicity, cost-saving, and speed, Canva is a reliable choice.
Cost: Canva uses a freemium pricing model. Premium accounts start at $9.95/month.
Adobe Illustrator – Create logos, icons and sketches
Adobe Illustrator offers 2D or 3D graphics manipulation to increase efficiency in the design workflow. Designers including both professional graphic designers and digital artists can use Illustrator to create many different types of digital products. Adobe keeps rolling out exciting features in Illustrator like variable fonts, faster document creation, easier image cropping, stylist sets to texts, stability enhancements, and modern user experience and many more to make it one of the best and most handy tools for web and graphic designers.
Vectornator
Vectornator is an illustration and design app, specifically optimized for iPads and Macs (available on iOS 13, iPadOS 13, and macOS Catalina and later), to deliver a unique and engaging experience. It’s made for artists who love to make vector art, drawings, typography, UI design, and more.
Artists can prototype and play with new ideas in a notebook and storyboard-like format, or export their designs to other software. Vectornator also scales beautifully to 5K iMac displays and supports the M1 Mac lineup.
Cost: Vectornator is completely free.
Filestage
Filestage is an online review and approval tool that gives graphic designers complete control over the content review process. The tool makes it simple for graphic designers to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders on a range of file types including images, PDFs, websites, and more. The tool places a strong emphasis on ease of use. This means that your stakeholders are able to easily leave their in-context feedback to move your project forward. An integrated to-do list gives you a laser-focus on feedback and makes sure you don’t miss a single comment.
Filestage also shows the status of projects at a glance. In just a moment you can see which stakeholders have approved your design and which ones are yet to review your work.
PicsArt
PicsArt’s all-in-one online Photo Editor features endless editing tools to help you create professional-grade content even if you don’t have any experience in the designing field. They even house an impressive Video Editor you can use to add music and effects to videos. The app — which also has a desktop web editor — also boasts one of the largest creative communities in the world.
The best part is that unlike professional-grade editors, PicsArt’s tools are intuitive, easy to use, and free. There is a wide range of creative web tools for businesses, making the editing experience on desktop much more efficient. From AI-powered background removal to creating designs from scratch, PicsArt offers all the necessary tools for you to succeed in content creation, social media, and web marketing efforts. PicsArt goes above and beyond the basic effects with trendy designs and Magic effects that completely transform images. New effects and tools are added frequently, so there’s always room for more creativity.
Their most recent addition is an exclusive feature called Replay, which allows you to apply editing steps to your photos in just a few taps. With hundreds of unique and impressive photo effects and design tools at your fingertips, your content will definitely stand out with PicsArt.
Crello
Crello‘s Animation Maker suite is what sets it apart from many cloud-based graphic design software. It gives users animated templates and objects to use to bring more engaging images and videos to life. Animated templates include formats for vertical and square video, Facebook and Instagram stories, and Facebook cover videos, which will help set your brand apart online.
Crello also comes with a large template and image library including illustrations, with plenty of options for various web content formats and platforms.
Cost: Crello Pro plan starts at $7.99 per month, billed annually. Or you can get its annual deal on AppSumo for $67.
Desygner
Desygner’s editor is an online-based Illustrator alternative that is super simple to use. Drag & drop elements into the design, replace images with one click, change fonts, colors, and text. Work with layers and multiple pages at ease.
Search Royalty-free images directly from Desygner using any keyword and find the highest quality royalty-free images to customize your designs.
In addition to:
– Thousands of pre-made templates
– Thousands of icons & shapes
– Hundreds of web fonts & pre-made banners
– Free Brand Library: where you can set up and organize your assets like colors, fonts, texts, images, videos and use them directly in the editor.
– In-built PDF Editor: gives you the ease of being able to edit PDF files and documents no matter where and when they were created.
Conclusion:
Graphic design software is used to create graphics for printing and digital media. It’s essential for typographers, graphic artists, photographers, and anyone doing creative work. We put this guide together with lots of advice about the best graphic design software, free software, how to use them.