Graphics are a must have when you are about to create a stunning presentation. Whether you are looking to make your website more attractive or about to come up with a creative layout, say for your resume or promotional piece, graphic design works would be handy. The graphic style offers more life to your layouts, making them more vibrant and engrossing.
Our list of the best photo and graphic design software for beginners will start you on your way to creating an awesome design. There are many free graphic design software free download out there, with features like photo editing and vector drawing.
Adobe Illustrator CC
A vector graphics solution, Adobe Illustrator CC, is highly-suitable for professional graphic designers and artists. It has a wide array of tools that can greatly help in the creation of graphic designs for websites, brand logos, video games, and print. It works well with vector graphics, allowing users to come up with beautifully crafted designs, topography, sketches, and illustrations.
The product allows for faster design creation owing to its built-in design presets and templates, which can be easily accessed. Its integration with Adobe Creative Cloud makes sharing of projects by individuals easy. Sharp segments and clear lines can be produced as the solution can create paths that automatically align to the nearest pixel grid. Its Snap to Pixel feature can be customized to align an artwork with precise pixel boundaries.
Adobe Creative Cloud is available in a variety of pricing plans starting at $29.99/month.
Lunacy
Platform: Windows
Download link: official website, Microsoft Store
Lunacy is a graphic design tool developed specifically to help people bring their ideas into reality as quickly as possible.
Not only does it feature all the standard tools of visual design, such as shapes,text, color, but also enables you to create visual artwork in a matter of minutes.
How does it do it? Lunacy features a wide, free library of graphical assets including:
- More than 100,000 icons for your projects
- Thousand of photographs and models that can be easily combined on the same canvas
- Beautiful vector illustrations created in the most relevant and trendy visual styles
With built-in graphic assets, you can create UI screens, blog illustrations, landing pages, prototypes, and so much more.
If you want, you can easily add text with its typography tool and draw your own vector illustrations with paths and transformation tools.
Lunacy is free graphic design software for both complete beginners and experienced designers who want to optimize their graphic design workflow and create beautiful graphic design projects quickly without losing on quality.
Pros:
- Built-in library of high-quality illustrations, icons, and other visual assets
- Simple, clean UI
- Desktop version with offline access
Cons:
- No layers
Krita-Digital Painting. Creative Freedom
This is graphic designing software that has a highly customizable user interface. It also has a drawing aid to help you create wonderful designs for personal use or commercial. The drawing aid feature allows users to expound on their drawing capabilities to give a detailed description of what a graphic designer is trying to convey. You can also select several mask tools for your designs. This is a free open-source graphic design software that offers professional visual designing tools to both beginners and experts. The tool supports all sorts of Oss including Windows, Linux & Mac OS. If you are doing conceptual art, textures, illustrations & comics, this is the perfect tool for you. Since it’s highly customizable, it provides a wonderful user experience to anyone using it. The software also has a Resource manager which helps to import brushes and textures to extend the tools and functionalities.
Adobe Photoshop
A photo, image, and graphic design editing solution, Adobe Photoshop CC is targeted at professional graphic designers, artists, and photographers. It enables users to design websites, posters, icons, mobile apps, and banners using easy-to-use tools and built-in templates. For photographers, the app has tools that aid in picture creation and enhancement, making excellent works of art out of photographs.
Using the software, you can create and enhance illustrations, 3D artworks, and paintings. Unique patterns and effects, along with brushes, aid in the creation and customization of digital works. Other key features include brush smoke smoothing, brush management, access to Lightroom photos, paint symmetry, and luminance masking controls, among many others.
You can avail of Adobe Photoshop CC in a variety of pricing plans, starting at $29.90/month.
Canva
Platform: online
Link: canva.com
Canva is a go-to graphic design online tool for many non-designers because it makes their life so much easy.
It was created specifically to help people create designs from pre-made elements with almost no editing. All you have to do is find the appropriate visual assets in Canva’s huge library of graphic elements and then combine them on your canvas.
Canva elements include icons, photographs, illustrations, charts, and many more. Canva also offers a great number of pre-made templates, font pairs, and visual compositions so you don’t need to create your designs from scratch.
Although Canva’s editing tools are quite simple, they get the job done. You can transform and resize elements, change their opacity settings, edit text.
You can also upload your own elements and either combine them with Canva assets or create compositions entirely from elements that you upload yourself.
The downside is, however, not all visual assets are free and you have to purchase some of them, otherwise, your project will have watermarks.
Pros:
- Huge library of graphic assets
- Animated posts
- A great number of templates for every graphic design project imaginable, from infographics to CD covers
Cons:
- Not all assets are free
- Minimal editing capabilities
Vectr-Free Online Vector Graphics Editor
This tool is used online and is very easy to use. It has no learning curves making it a perfect choice for beginners. Another thing that makes it a good tool for beginners is the availability of guides and online tutorials. The tool also allows you to collect personal data. If you are just starting but want to create professional designs, this software will do the trick. Beginners who want to focus on vector designing don’t have enough cash to spend on premium tools then this will be a thoughtful option for you. The best thing about this software is that it supports all kinds of devices and anyone can use it. There is also a web-based app version of this tool. Other features of this graphic software include pen tools, shape tools, pathfinders and many others.
Adobe InDesign
A page design and layout solution, Adobe InDesign CC is used predominantly in the creation, preflighting, and publication of documents for both print and digital media. It is a desktop publishing software that can be used to design posters, brochures, stationery, flyers, annual reports, and magazines, among many other projects. You can also create eBooks, interactive PDFs, and digital magazines using the platform.
Adobe InDesign CC has tools that can help you collaborate with writers and editors, which will enable you to come up with and design documents a lot faster. It can share text, colors, graphics, and shapes as it gives users access to its Creative Cloud Libraries. Other notable features include paragraph borders, object height and width, endnotes, fonts, and PDF accessibility enhancements.
You can purchase Adobe InDesign CC as a single application or part of Adobe Creative Cloud. It is available in a variety of pricing plans starting at $29.99/month.
Blender
With 3D modeling capabilities and visual effects coupled with sculpting & animations, this graphic designing tool will give you a great experience while designing. Another great feature is the skin modifier which gives you several skins to apply in your designs. Other unique features of this tool include camera & object motion tracking and masks. Downsides include stiff curves and cluttered menu. Blender is an open-source 3D graphics designing software with numerous tools offered in its free version. It is perfect for creating visual effects, 3D models, interactive 3D apps & animations. Other notable features are high-end production path tracer, rendering, video editing, phyton scripting, modeling, and simulation.
Conclusion:
Whether you’re a novice or experienced graphic artist or photographer, graphic designing software is essential to your creative craft. Everybody can be an artist with the right tools, but having graphic designing software is the best way to get started.