Are you looking for the best free design tools to help you create awesome and attractive social media graphics for your business’ social media accounts? Great! We’ve created a list of the top 5 best free design tools for creating awesome graphics.
Designing social media graphics can be a tedious process if you are not familiar with the different design programs that are on the market. Luckily, there are many free design tools available to new graphic artists. Here are the top four of the most popular options for social media graphics.
Desygner (Web, iOS, Android)
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Desygner has some of the most advanced features of any of the apps we tested—while still being simple to use. If you don’t want to go the template route (although it does have thousands of great templates to work from), additional features like a free-drawing pen tool and the ability to import from PDF, PSD, and SVG files give you a lot more creative freedom.
Take that pen tool: with a project open, click Drawing and then Pen. Now, click and drag to draw a free-form line into any shape you want. Handy, right? Well, click on the shape you just drew, and you get some additional, super-powerful options in the top menu bar. You can click Convert to Image Box to create a frame that you can add an image to, or Opacity, Fill Color, Stroke Color, or Stroke to control how it looks. And you have all the same options with the other, shaped drawing tools and the Path tool, which is basically just the pen tool but you click to draw straight lines.
If you go to a lot of effort to make an Instagram post, you want to be able to use the same elements on Facebook. Click the resize button at the bottom of the screen, and select a new size. Desygner will convert your canvas to the new size—but as a new Page in the same document. This means you can work on one design and quickly replicate it for other platforms.
While working on your own designs like this is absolutely more time-consuming than working from templates (which, again, Desygner has thousands of), it does mean your social media graphics are going to be unique. There’s a certain sameness to a lot of the default templates in every app, and you’ll begin to spot them in your social media feeds. Desygner helps you stand out.
Desygner Price: Free; from $9.95 for more templates and assets, as well as features like saving your own designs as templates.
Snappa (Web)
Of all the apps on this list, Snappa is the only one whose free plan has access to the exact same templates, graphics, images, and other design resources as the paid plan. The catch is that, instead of having to carefully check what template you’re using, you can only download three designs a month.
If you only occasionally need to create images for your social media channels—or just want to create a one-off banner for your Twitter account or Facebook page—it’s really nice to not constantly be running into upgrade notifications. As good as Canva and Spark are, the free plans do make you very aware that there’s a paid plan they’d love you to be on. Snappa is a lot less pushy—but no less useful.
The other mild difference with Snappa is that its templates—while excellent—aren’t as thoroughly themed as some of the other options. (Right now, just before Christmas, there are only three generic holiday-season Instagram post templates.) You need to look at the defaults as a base you can customize and build from, rather than something ready-built that you’re just adding a photo and changing the words with.
If you want to make a birthday post, for example, you should look at the templates and pick one that has a layout you like. Then, open it and add your own picture with the Bkgrnd tool in the sidebar—either by uploading one or finding one of the included royalty-free stock images that works for you. You can customize it further by clicking on Effects and adding a color overlay, blur, or other adjustment—most of which serve to make any text on top of the image more legible.
Of course, you then need to add balloons. Because every birthday post has balloons. To do that, click the Graphics tool and then Icons. Use the search to find a balloon you like, and click to add it. To make sure everything lines up nicely, you can click the Toggle Grid option in the top toolbar and use it to position things perfectly.
When you’re happy with how things look, click Download to save your image or Share to push it directly to your social media accounts—so long as you haven’t maxed out your free posts. If you have, you’ll need to upgrade or click Save to keep the file until the monthly limit resets.
Snappa Price: Free for 3 downloads or shares per month; from $15/month for unlimited downloads, shares, and integration with Buffer and your social media accounts.
Venngage
Pricing: Free Plan available | Premium: $19/month| Business: $49/ month| Enterprise: Custom Plans|
Platforms: Web
Venngage, like easelly, is a powerful infographic maker that helps you develop colorful and engaging infographics for your social media audience.
It’s got over 7500 pre-made infographic templates that you can load into the editor and then start customizing.
The drag and drop editor allows you to add photos, icons, and text to the infographic. One of the other features that comes in very handy here too is that of creating and adding charts to the infographic.
Charts play a major role in infographics and Venngage does extremely well when it comes to them, and this makes the infographics even better.
Visme
Pricing: Free Plan available | Standard: $15/month| Business: $29/ month| Enterprise: Custom Plans|
Platforms: Web
If you’re looking for a design tool that can not only help you design infographics but also powerful charts and animations, Visme should be your go-to tool.
This tool not only lets you create stunning social media posts but also makes it easy for you to develop presentations.
Its charts feature, in particular, is pretty amazing due to the sheer variety of charts that you can create using it. From simple pie charts and trees to maps, you can work on a whole range of charts on Visme.
These charts, in turn, can come in very handy for numerous social media posts, especially if you’re into the B2B space.
What’s more?
It’s also possible to create animated social media posts with motion so that you can further catch the attention of social media users.
PicMonkey
With a library of millions of stock images, PicMonkey has something for everyone. It includes all the usual borders, typefaces, textures, and other graphic-enhancement methods.
You can share images from the site directly to the most popular social sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
PicMonkey isn’t free, but they offer a seven-day free trial. If you like what you see, it will cost a minimum of $6 a month.
Conclusion
There are tons of free design tools out there that can help you create high quality graphics for social media in minutes. Create bold images, edit photos, grab quotes, designs, icons, and more. Learn how to use these free design tools.