Graphic Design Online is an educational design site which aims to help anyone understand the basics, and more, of graphic design. We aim to help people understand that they are able to do this for themselves with no prior knowledge, all you need is an idea, some software and some time.
What becomes a graphic designer? To answer this question, we need to know about the feature of graphic design first . Graphic design may be the subset of visual communication , but it contributes on its own. There are both academic and more popular definitions on the topic :
Adobe InDesign
Platform: Windows, Mac
Price: Requires Creative Cloud subscription ($20.99/month for a single app, $52.99/month for complete suite)
Skill level: Advanced
Best for: Desktop publishing
Adobe InDesign is considered an industry standard for graphic designers and publishers. It’s been around since 1999 and was the successor to Adobe PageMaker. InDesign is suitable for both print and digital designs, making it a popular choice for laying out publications like magazines and books. Its proprietary file format is .INDD, but it can export to a number of file formats, including .SWF and .EPUB for ebooks. Though it’s a powerful program, its learning curve might prove too complex and time-consuming for casual users.
Lucidpress
Platform: Browser-based
Price: Free to use, $5.95/mo or $12.95/mo
Skill level: Beginner
Best for: Desktop publishing
Lucidpress is free to use, runs in your browser, and designed to be intuitive. This makes it an excellent choice for beginners and non-designers. Lucidpress is optimized for both digital and print design, so it supports RGB and CMYK color formats, as well as video. It also supports multi-page documents, unlike many alternative design tools. Its robust feature set is plenty for casual designers, but advanced users will likely want to stick to their professional program of choice.
Vectr
The best free vector editor for live collaboration
SPECIFICATIONS
Platform: Browser, Windows, Linux, Chrome OSTODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Helpful tutorials+Browser and desktop versions+Great collaboration tools
REASONS TO AVOID
-Lacks some advanced featuresAdvertisement
Vectr is the best free graphic design software for working collaboratively. Along with vector tools, filters, shadows and fonts, it includes a great set of live collaboration and synchronisation options. These make it easy to team up with colleagues or clients, to let them see what you’re doing, and provide feedback on your work.
Adobe Photoshop
Platform: Windows, Mac
Price: Requires Creative Cloud subscription ($20.99/month for a single app, $52.99/month for complete suite)
Skill level: Advanced
Best for: Photo editing
Ah, Adobe Photoshop. The photo editing software that’s become so ubiquitous that people use its name as a verb. Hey, can you Photoshop this for me real quick? Although it’s a robust program, not everyone needs all the bells & whistles it boasts. If you need multiple layers, masks and support for various color models, it’s a great choice. Besides its proprietary .PSD and .PSB file formats, it supports many others. Graphic designers who are used to doing heavy lifting are already well-versed in Photoshop. If you’re an aspiring graphic designer, it pays to learn. If you’re not, other softwares can likely meet your needs just fine.
Canva
Platform: Browser-based
Price: Free to use or $12.95/month
Skill level: Beginner
Best for: Social media graphics
Founded in 2012, Canva has grown to over 10 million users, and for good reason. Their online design tool is incredibly intuitive and easy for beginners to pick up. With drag-and-drop functionality and professionally designed templates, Canva has become a popular resource for non-designers in a pinch. It’s great for making graphics, but if you need to create multi-page documents, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Canva also doesn’t provide any template locking functionality for brand assets like fonts, colors & logos. But if simple graphics are all you’re after, Canva’s hard to beat.
Adobe Illustrator
Platform: Windows, Mac
Price: Requires Creative Cloud subscription ($20.99/month for a single app, $52.99/month for complete suite)
Skill level: Advanced
Best for: Drawing
Given their dominance in the industry, it’s not surprising that this list includes three Adobe products. This one, Adobe Illustrator, specializes in vector graphic design. Users can draw sketches, icons, typography, logos and more. Like other Adobe products, Illustrator has a learning curve that can feel too steep to many. However, there’s a wide variety of tutorials and videos online to help users discover features and get the most from their software. Power users appreciate the precise controls, and PC Magazine rates it as one of the best vector drawing applications.
Gravit Designer
Platform: Windows, Mac, others
Price: Free
Skill level: Beginner/Intermediate
Best for: Vector design
If you’re looking for a cross-platform design software, Gravit Designer is available on just about everything. It’s available to download on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS—and if that isn’t enough, you can also use it in your browser. Having said that, it might surprise you to learn that Gravit Designer is totally free. However, this could also be the reason you choose not to use it. Because it’s a free tool created by a small team, it lacks some of the powerhouse features you’ll find in Adobe software or Corel Draw. But if you’re just starting out and don’t want to spend hundreds, Gravit Designer is a great way to get your feet wet.
Setka Editor
Platforms: Windows, Mac
Setka bills itself as “everything you need to create content that converts.” This graphic design software is primarily focused on delivering enhanced content branding across your website, ad campaigns, and social media posts — and works from within your current CMS or in the cloud.
The caveat? Although the Setka Editor is free to try for two weeks, companies will need to select a plan — Starter, Pro, or Enterprise — to unlock the full feature set and keep using Setka.
Adobe Spark
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS
Adobe Spark is a free alternative to the company’s popular, for-pay Adobe Illustrator. While it’s not nearly as full-featured, it does support integration with other Adobe products. It’s easy to use and it comes with a host of free templates. If you’re looking to quickly create posters or videos for ad campaigns, Spark is a great choice.
The potential drawback? A limited feature set makes this a great starting point for beginners but less useful for more in-depth projects or experienced designers. The good news is that Spark is available for both web and mobile, meaning you can design anywhere, anytime.
Blender
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
Blender is an open-source, 3D creation suite that makes it possible for graphic designers to create everything from rigging to animation to rendering and motion tracking. It also provides support for 2D animation and has an active community of users committed to helping Blender improve.
While Blender is a powerful tool, it’s not ideal for beginners — complex menus and a massive amount of design options mean you need to know your way around graphic design basics to make the best use of this tool.
SketchUp
Platforms: Windows, Mac
SketchUp offers both free and paid design plans, with its no-cost version still offering substantial advantages for designers. A robust modeling platform, it’s a great tool for creating 2D or 3D designs for furniture or other complex objects.
With an easy-to-use interface and great support, SketchUp is a great tool if you’re looking to create product pages that feature in-depth images and dimensions. Potential drawbacks include limited storage space for free plans and no mobile support.
Genially
Platform: Windows
Genially makes design easy with a user-friendly interface and robust options that allow designers to create their own artwork from scratch. With this software, you can leverage pre-built templates or add interactive features such as buttons, layers, and hidden text. The free version of Genially has no limits on the number of projects you can create and there are now more than 12,000,000 users worldwide designing with Genially and supporting the community.
There is a caveat, however. While the free version is substantive, some features — such as offline viewing and brand personalization — are reserved for paid plans only.
Vecteezy
The best free vector editor for beginners
SPECIFICATIONS
Platform: BrowserTODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Easy to use+Good vector tools+Many elements to work with
REASONS TO AVOID
-Account required to save work
Need a painless way to get started with vectors? Vecteezy is a free, in-browser vector editor. Work with ready-made vectors that you can customise to suit your needs, or build your own designs from the ground up. Either way, this tool is easy to use and has some nice features such as advanced transformations and keyboard shortcuts. Signing up for the Pro version, meanwhile, gets you a bunch more tools and resources.
Conclusion
If you find yourself working with the same sort of business documents over and over, it might be time to think about investing in some graphic design software. With so many programs on the market, choosing one can feel overwhelming. If you are looking for affordable similar to Illustrator or Photoshop, try GIMP.