You don’t need a graphic design degree to create something beautiful. With the right tools, pretty much anyone can design a logo, banner or picture that gets people’s attention. There are plenty of free downloadable graphic design software packages that make it possible for you to create almost anything from your desktop or mobile device – no expensive software required!
Here are great tools to get you started in graphic design.
BEST FOR COLLABORATING Canva
Canva is full-featured editing software with real-time team collaboration tools that work well for teams with various design capabilities, plus you can share the link with external stakeholders.Pros
- Drag-and-drop interface
- Great for beginners
- Free plan available
Cons
- Mobile app has fewer features
- Free plan limits the number of available icons
- Program can slow down your computer
Since 2013, Canva continues to develop fresh and high-quality templates for logo making. This graphic design tool is perfect for teamwork with multiple users being able to easily create changes and organize projects making this the top pick for best for collaboration.
You can use Canva via a web-based application or on its mobile app. This graphic design tool provides tons of high-quality templates and lets you design your logo from scratch or use the logo maker tool. Top features include:
- Out-of-the-box color and font combos
- Millions of free and premium images, symbols, and illustrations
- Shared folders for teams
- More than 1,700 logo templates
- Ability to comment and collaborate in real-time
- Link-sharing for external approval
All Canva plans come with a free logo template, fonts, and graphics. You can easily download files in SVG, PDF, JPG, and PNG formats or share it to social media. Choose from three plans:
- Free: Full design editor with 5GB of storage
- Pro: $12.99 per month or $119.99 for an annual subscription for use by up to five people, 100GB storage, and one brand kit
- Enterprise: $30 per month per person for built-in workflows, unlimited storage, and enterprise-level support
BEST FOR MAC Affinity Designer
Built for Mac, Affinity Designer is a low-budget graphic design tool you can use on your iPad or desktop.Pros
- Inexpensive one-time fee
- Raster and vector editing tools
- Intuitive iPad version
Cons
- iPad sketch tools can be buggy
- Not for people unfamiliar with design software
Released in 2014, Affinity Designer is a native Mac application with reliable features similar to Adobe Illustrator. As an Apple Design Award winner, Affinity Designer is the best choice for Mac users.
Along with Mac and iPad use, Affinity Designer is compatible with Windows operating systems. This editing software is different from others because it allows you to switch between raster and vector designs, so you can add brush strokes or edit individual pixels on your raster image, then add that detail to your vector logo.
Graphic design experience helps when using Affinity Designer, but many online tutorials exist to walk you through logo making. Other features include:
- Scan a pencil drawing
- Advanced grids
- Auto alignment tools
- Real-time blend mode preview
- Sketch your logo on your iPad
You can download your files as PSD, AI, PDF, SVG, JPG, TIFF, and EXR. Affinity Designer also supports most color palettes such as CMYK and Pantone, making it easy to send your logo to the printer and get a true color match.
One of the best parts of Affinity Designer is its price. You’ll pay a flat fee of $49.99 for desktop software or $19.99 for an iPad application. For this cost, you can use the software for a lifetime, and all future updates are free.
Adobe Photoshop.
Adobe Photoshop is synonymous with photo editing for graphic designers. It is one of the most popular photo editing software tools in the market in a robust package that offers excellent graphic design capabilities.
Key Features:
- Design Tools: Offers a lot of design tools for both mobile apps and web
- Creative Cloud: Its active synchronization with Adobe Creative Cloud offers a lot of unique features, including Content-Aware Crop, Face-Aware Liquify, Artboards, the Design Space view, synced libraries, a glyph panel, Cloud Documents, touch, and stylus input support, among others.
- User Interface: Adobe is continuously working on delivering a more customizable user interface. It offers several targeted workspace layouts, including Graphic and Web, Motion, 3D, Painting, and Photography, Designer can also create your own custom layout of panels and windows.
- Open-Source GIMP Software: If you don’t want to pay a dime, then you can download and install this software for free. Consider installing it on a powerful machine to avoid lag and other performance issues.
Pros:
- It offers a complimentary mobile application
- Its slick user interface offers a lot of assistance for easy use
- Got a rich set of typography and drawing tools
- Comes loaded with 3D design capabilities
- Offers a library and photo management with Adobe Creative Cloud
- Efficient file transfer between different programs
- Multiple design tools come with responsive graphics
- Ability to edit animation and video layers
- Users can define the size of the canvas, create custom brushes, work in 3D, isolate elements from backgrounds, among others.
Cons:
- Adobe now offers Photoshop along with the subscription of Creative Cloud. The recurring payment turns out to be more costly, and people who want to buy software forever don’t have the option to buy a perpetual license
- A plethora of features might overwhelm a new user
- Offers lessor support for raster and vector images like SVG files.
Adobe offers Photoshop at a subscription price of US$33.99 per month per license.
Get started with Adobe Photoshop today.Try Adobe Photoshop
2. Adobe InDesign.
Adobe InDesign is a must-have software tool if you are in the business of publishing. It offers excellent capabilities to design stunning magazines, info sheets, and brochures while easily exporting them to PDF or HTML.
Key Features:
- Easy To Use: Unlike PhotShop, InDesign requires a low learning curve. That means new users can quickly learn how to combine text and graphics to achieve the best results.
- Adjust Layout: The ‘Adjust Layout’ feature empowers the designer just to change the text of the template, and design gets adjusted automatically, which is great for infographics.
- Sensei Technology: Adobe’s AI-powered Sensei technology ensures automatic resizing and arrangement of images.
- Adobe InCopy: Designers can leverage InCopy to work with other members of the team by sharing text, colors, and graphics.
Pros:
- Graphic designers can efficiently combine graphics and texts for easier streamlining and optimizations of files.
- It allows users to add tags to indexes, keywords, anchor text frames, footnotes, table of contents, and captions with hyperlinks.
- It supports HTML exporting that enables web developers to export clean and simple codes during the implementation of the website’s layout designs. This works great for WordPress sites.
- It can help you eliminate redundant div tags in HTML files along with insignificant content grouping.
- Has the capability of resizing multiple objects and change the width and height at the same time.
- Designers can leverage its Eyedropper tool to apply position or size instantly to another object within the document.
- It is an industry-standard for desktop publishing.
Cons:
- The less intuitive user interface can make things overwhelming for new users.
- Not positioned for general users. Suitable for enterprise use only.
- Relatively expensive than other similar software available in the market.
- PDF comment integration needs perfection
Pricing Plans:
Adobe offers InDesign at a monthly subscription of $20.99. The full Creative Cloud costs $52.99 per month.
Get started with Adobe InDesign today.Try Adobe InDesign
3. CorelDraw Graphics Suite.
CorelDraw Graphics Suite packs some pro-level features and offers a highly accessible interface that is easy to use. It is a bundle of multiple applications that deliver powerful editing features.
Key Features:
- Content Exchange: It is Corel’s online digital library through which registered users can get access to thousands of high-resolution photographs and digital images. It also offers over 2000 vehicle templates, 1000 fonts, 350 professionally designed templates, more than 500 interactive frames, over 600 gradients, vector, and bitmap fills.
- Flexible Payment: Corel offers three payment programs through which users can buy the software along with nominal charges for regular upgrades. It also offers an upgrade program for existing users.
- Customizable UI: You get a customizable UI environment for the desktop, icon sizing, toolboxes, options for how your documents open, and window border color scheme. Users can also visit Corel’s developer community website to design macros that suit their workflow.
- New Pointilizer: Corel’s new pointilizer offers a lot of variable parameters that are not just limited to regular dots.
Pros:
- It offers app-wide workflow and under-the-hood innovation and performance enhancements to boost productivity
- Works perfectly without any lag with Surface Pen
- Users get the option to choose GPU acceleration over the default CPU while working with system-intensive sophisticated vector graphics
- Smooth transition from desktop to tablet mode to leverage touch features
- It offers better EPS and third-party PDF importing capabilities and leverages with their GPL Ghostscript feature
- It is capable of exporting files in up to 48 file types, including AutoCAD, JPG, PNG, SVG, AutoCAD, JPG, and TIFF. It can also open 35 file types, including EPS, HTML, AutoCAD, PDF, PowerPoint, SVG, and even old FreeHand files.
Cons:
- Unlike Adobe, there are no complimentary mobile applications offered by Corel
- Two many payment options might confuse the user
- Not easy to operate for beginners
Pricing Plans::
CorelDraw is available for a 15-day free trial. Its full version is available for $474 with a 30-days money-back guarantee. You can also pay for an annual subscription for $198, or just $16.50/month.
Get started with CorelDraw Graphics Suite.
Conclusion
To sum up, the graphic designing is a lucrative business and there are many different flavors that the graphic designer can choose from. The tools are different for each type and niche of graphics, so you will have to decide which one is best for your specialty. While looking for your graphic design software you need to look for the best one capable of giving you what you want but also easy to use and within your budget range.