Choosing graphic design software for a beginner can be tough. There are so many graphic design programs to choose from and most of them come with an expensive price tag. But don’t fret! Even though you’ll want to spend $1,000 on tools later on in your career, it’s okay to start with a free tool or cheap alternative that will not only get the job done but also fulfil your needs as a beginner.
Best Free Graphic Design Software for Mac Reviews and Guide: Choosing a graphic design software is as complicated as picking a good arts college. But rest assured, in order to save you from having a mental breakdown while browsing through endless blogs and product reviews, we have hand-picked the best free graphic design software!
Snappa
Snappa is another DIY graphic design tool that offers plenty of templates to build off of, royalty-free images to choose from, and the ability to upload your own branded images to include in your designs. Two features that set Snappa apart from other Canva alternatives include the ability to import your own custom fonts and the ability to share your designs directly to social media without leaving Snappa.
Snappa caps downloads for free users at five per month, and free users can’t share images on social media, so if you want full access to all of your designs and to share images on social media directly from Snappa, its Pro subscription would be a better option.
Choose Snappa if:
- You want to be able to create and share social media images on the fly (without needing to re-upload them to a social sharing tool).
- You want to use custom fonts in your images.
Price: Starts free; paid plans start at $10 per month, billed annually.
Stencil
Stencil is a lightweight Canva alternative that makes it easy to create images for your website or social channels on the fly. It has different browser extensions so you can easily highlight text or capture an image to pull it into your design creations, and it boasts more than 100,000 different quotes you can choose from to add to social media graphics. Stencil has fewer templates to choose from than other options on this list, so if you need a template to get started, Stencil may not have as many for you to choose between.
Free Stencil users are limited to creating 10 images per month and have to upgrade to the Unlimited plan for $12/month to get the full capabilities of the tool.
Choose Stencil if:
- You plan to produce social media posts featuring motivational quotes to appeal to your audience.
- You source inspiration for visual content from all over the internet and want to be able to easily access your design tools from a browser extension.
Price: Starts free; $9 per month for pro subscription, billed annually.
Gravit
Platforms: PC, Mac, Chrome OS, Linux
Gravit is a vector design application created by the makers of Corel Draw. With a host of tools for creating vector art and a self-adjusting interface, Gravit earns its place among the best free graphic design software for Mac and Windows — the tool is also available for ChromeOS and Linux.
Worth noting? When you sign up for a free trial of Gravit you automatically get access to “Pro” features, including the ability to work offline and see version history. However, you lose these features when your trial is up unless you’re willing to pay for a subscription.
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.
Inkscape
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
Its tagline is “draw freely” and Inkscape lives up to that mantra — there’s no cost for this graphic design tool and it packs a host of features for both beginners and experienced marketers.
In addition to cross-platform support and an active community, Inkscape is known for superior vector art options and wide format compatibility. One drawback is that the sluggish controls can frustrate some users if they’re looking to quickly create and publish designs.
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.
Gimp
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
One of the most popular open-source design tools, Gimp is often compared to its closest for-pay competitor, Photoshop, with users on both sides making passionate arguments for one platform over the other.
Gimp gets high praise as a free design tool for its support of all file formats, ease of digital retouching, and ability to quickly create new designs from scratch. In addition, Gimp features a customizable interface that allows more experienced designers to make use of the tool’s capabilities. Worth noting? Gimp does not support any Photoshop plugins.
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.
Paint 3D
Platform: Windows
The classic Microsoft design tool is back, free, and updated to deliver more functionality. While it can’t compete with some of the more robust design tools on our list, Paint 3D comes with realistic textures, 2D cutout creation, and a host of 3D tools and effects.
If you’re a beginner looking for an easy bar to entry for straightforward graphic design, Paint 3D is a great place to start. There’s virtually no learning curve and since it’s made by Microsoft, the tool naturally works well on all Windows 10 devices.
Gravit Designer
Gravit Designer is a full-featured vector design app suitable for all manner of jobs, from screen and icon designs through to presentations, illustration and animation.
- Windows / Mac / Linux / Browser
- Precision – Unmatched precision in any unit from creation to exporting.
- Structure – Powerful pages with masters, real layers and symbols to structure your content.
- Vectors – Non-destructive booleans, knife tool, and path graphs.
- Layout – Grids, anchors and auto-layouts made for pixel perfect screen designs.
- Multiple fills/borders, effects and blending modes together with shared styles.
- Text – Handcrafted powerful text engine with text on path, web fonts, and styles.
- Export high quality PDFs, SVGs and Images using slices and multiple assets.
- Advanced – Presentations, sketch and EPS import, design templates, transformations, and more.
Inkscape
Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format.
- Windows / Mac / Linux
- Drawing: pencil tool (freehand drawing with simple paths), pen tool (creating Bézier curves and straight lines), calligraphy tool (freehand drawing using filled paths representing calligraphic strokes)
- Shape tools: rectangles (may have rounded corners), ellipses (includes circles, arcs, segments), stars/polygons (can be rounded and/or randomized), spirals
- Text tool (multi-line text, full on-canvas editing)
- Embedded bitmaps
- Clones (“live” linked copies of objects), including a tool to create patterns and arrangements of clones
- Transformations (moving, scaling, rotating, skewing), both interactively and by specifying exact numeric values
- Z-order operations (raising and lowering)
- Grouping objects (“select in group” without ungrouping, or “enter the group” making it a temporary layer)
- Layers (lock and/or hide individual layers, rearrange them, etc; layers can form a hierarchical tree)
- Alignment and distribution commands
Krita
Krita is a FREE and open source painting tool designed for concept artists, illustrators, matte and texture artists, and the VFX industry. Krita has been in development for over 10 years and has had an explosion in growth recently.
It offers many common and innovative features to help the amateur and professional alike. See below for some of the highlighted features.
- Windows / Mac / Linux
- Brush Stabilizers
- Layer Masks
- Layer Management
- Pop-up Palette
- Brush Engines
- HDR Support
- PSD Support
- Resource Manager
Crello
The simplest online image editor to produce posts, covers, graphics, and posters using the best software on the web.
- Web Browser Based
- Filters
- Crop
- Blur
- Shapes
Conclusion
This post will give you great free graphic design software for beginners to use. It is important that you get familiar with some of the core principles of graphic design before you start creating graphics for a company or business. This list will provide you with some great free graphic design software on both PC and Mac.