Do you want to learn graphic design but you don’t know where to start? In this article, I’m going to share my favorite graphic design tools for beginners. Most of them are free or at least have a free tier.
23 best designer tools for web and graphic design professionals
1. ProofHub – Proofing tool
Designing teams are overloaded with creative work that includes discussions regarding the design, drafting the framework for the design, making changes, and many other things to handle. The design you make will be checked at multiple levels before it gets final. And the whole process includes countless changes, several feedback, and many things. So, the biggest challenge that comes for designers is proofing.
An online proofing tool like ProofHub for designing teams will help you manage all your tasks easily and hassle-free. The client can easily explain to you small changes like- Hey, shift this text here, or add color to this portion of the design. It eliminates the game of emails, feedback, and approvals and reduces the time consumed for the entire process. With an online proofing tool like ProofHub, you can make changes in your file instantly, add comments, highlight the flaws in the design while keeping everyone in the loop.
2. Adobe Photoshop
Launched in 1988, Photoshop has become a staple in the life of designers. Imagine a program to take your artistic style into a digital world with confidence, a program that compliments your artistic style. Photoshop is an extremely powerful program for creating prints and patterns to be the best you can be in the designing world. For graphic designers, it has countless options, tools, and settings to open up new opportunities, to create a design that is more authentic with proper guidance.
Photoshop for Designers allows you to:
- Build confidence in your design skills
- Enjoy the new insights
- Create digital artwork based off your drawings
- Learn from step-by-step instruction
- A wonderful way to learn and remember
- Speed up your design process
- Bring your ideas to life
- Stay motivated through daily emails and lessons
3. Adobe Illustrator – Create logos, icons and sketches
Adobe Illustrator offers 2D or 3D graphics manipulation to increase efficiency in the design workflow. Designers including both professional graphic designers and digital artists can use Illustrator to create many different types of digital products. Adobe keeps rolling out exciting features in Illustrator like variable fonts, faster document creation, easier image cropping, stylist sets to texts, stability enhancements, and modern user experience, and many more to make it one of the best and most handy tools for web and graphic designers.
4. Filestage
Filestage is an online review and approval tool that gives graphic designers complete control over the content review process. The tool makes it simple for graphic designers to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders on a range of file types including images, PDFs, websites, and more. The tool places a strong emphasis on ease of use. This means that your stakeholders can easily leave their in-context feedback to move your project forward. An integrated to-do list gives you a laser focus on feedback and makes sure you don’t miss a single comment.
Filestage also shows the status of projects at a glance. In just a moment you can see which stakeholders have approved your design and which ones are yet to review your work.
5. PicsArt
PicsArt’s all-in-one online Photo Editor features endless editing tools to help you create professional-grade content even if you don’t have any experience in the designing field. They even house an impressive Video Editor you can use to add music and effects to videos. The app — which also has a desktop web editor — also boasts one of the largest creative communities in the world.
The best part is that, unlike professional-grade editors, PicsArt’s tools are intuitive, easy to use, and free. There is a wide range of creative web tools for businesses, making the editing experience on the desktop much more efficient. From AI-powered background removal to creating designs from scratch, PicsArt offers all the necessary tools for you to succeed in content creation, social media, and web marketing efforts. PicsArt goes above and beyond the basic effects with trendy designs and Magic effects that completely transform images. New effects and tools are added frequently, so there’s always room for more creativity.
Their most recent addition is an exclusive feature called Replay, which allows you to apply editing steps to your photos in just a few taps. With hundreds of unique and impressive photo effects and design tools at your fingertips, your content will stand out with PicsArt.
6. Desygner
Desygner’s editor is an online-based Illustrator alternative that is super simple to use. Drag & drop elements into the design, replace images with one click, change fonts, colors, and text. Work with layers and multiple pages at ease.
Search Royalty-free images directly from Designer using any keyword and find the highest quality royalty-free images to customize your designs.
In addition to:
– Thousands of pre-made templates
– Thousands of icons & shapes
– Hundreds of web fonts & pre-made banners
– Free Brand Library: where you can set up and organize your assets like colors, fonts, texts, images, videos and use them directly in the editor.
– In-built PDF Editor: gives you the ease of being able to edit PDF files and documents no matter where and when they were created.
7. DesignBold
DesignBold is a user-friendly online design tool (basically a simplified version of Photoshop) that helps you create stunning designs within only several drags-and-drops. With a massive library of 12,080++ customizable layouts and myriad design resources, DesignBold is a great choice for you to build the website elements yourself. For instance, a logo, a header, or any other types of visuals for your website content. It is quick, cost-effective, and suitable for both amateur and professional designers.
8. Fotor – Online edit images & design poster, invitation
What makes Fotor one of the best tools for web and graphic design professionals out there in the market is that no matter the basic photo editing such as ‘one-tap enhance the image bright and portrait beauty, or making some business promotion stuff poster, card, Fotor is a good assistant for you. Just input your image or use its stock photo directly, adding some text and stickers to customize it easily. There are a number of Features that are helpful for designers, like:
- Design templates
- Design stickers
- Text and fonts
- Cloud saving
9. Logaster
If you want to create a logo for a small project, but do not want to spend a lot of time, then you can use an online logo generator Logaster. This tool will help you create many designs in a matter of minutes. Besides, you can create business cards and social media images with your logo. Created logos can be edited and downloaded or simply used for inspiration.
10. Sketch 3 – Graphic app
Sketch 3 has all the sets of nested symbols that will help create your best work. You can combine the symbols together to create reusable, flexible design with ease. There are number of features that are extremely useful for designers, like:
- Artboards
- Text and shared styles
- Color picker
- Pixel perfection
- And many others
All in all, Sketch 3 is a great tool for designers to explore.
11. Marvel – Prototyping tool
Prototyping is an imperative part of the web design workflow these days. With Marvel, you can create anything from scratch, and even sync designs from your cloud storage! Prototype and add gestures and transitions to your design. Marvel has a highly simplified interface that makes it fast and easy to learn. The tool works well for both non-designers and advanced UX folks.
12. Pixelmator – Image editor
Pixelmator Pro is a tool for designers packed with innovations. It features an elegant single window interface and simplified editing tools with intelligent image editing features. It is the perfect tool for building up multiple projects with intuitive tools for moving, resizing, and arranging layers. Pixelmator Pro is also crafted with a unique collection of handcrafted brushes to bring out the painter in you. The brushes have dual textures giving a unique dynamic blend to your art. So, make your design look as beautiful as you want with the image editor tool.
13. Sublime text – Text editor
Sublime text is the text editor that you are surely going to fall in love with. A minimalist coding editor, it will let you focus completely on your code. If you are working on websites, this will give your great power providing powerful shortcuts and tools to leap about a document, filter the file, and quickly make edits.
14. Github – Software development platform
Writing code is hard. Writing code without Git is unthinkable. Yes, designers can use Github as well. There is a sketch plugin allowing designers to use git directly in Sketch. Git will change the way you code for the best and make your design work enjoyable. It’s a platform that hosts your code on a remote Git server with a nice web interface and allows you to collaborate with other project members on the same server.
15. Webflow – Responsive web design tool
As one of the most amazing tools for web and graphic design professionals, Webflow allows you to create sites in a relatively short time. You can design and develop at the same time, with minimal effort with webflow. You do not need to know how to code to work with this tool; you can just export and change the site’s html / css tags according to your needs.
16. Iconfinder
The visual language is getting into a new trend and Iconfinder is the best place for designers to gain inspiration and brilliant icons. It hosts the world’s largest collection of premium icons. You can access all 2,171,326 icons in SVG, PNG and IconJar formats. This is probably the easiest way to get icons with a license that fits commercial purposes.
17. Coolors – Color scheme generator
Color selection is a big process in designing and often requires a lot of tweaking. This is where Coolors comes as a great tool. It is a superfast color scheme generator that creates, saves and shares the perfect palette in seconds. Choose your favorite colors and get your Material Design palette generated and downloadable. Save them to your account, or export them as .PNG, .PDF, .SVG, and more. Coolors is also available as an iOS App, Adobe Add-on and a Chrome Extension.
18. Palleton – A color scheme
Colors will bring life to any design and a designer knows the huge importance of a good color scheme. Palleton is a designer tool for creating color combinations that work together well. If you need some help coming up with a color scheme for your website, Palleton will give you some amazing combinations. Choose your colors on a color wheel and select from some tried color combinations such as Monochromatic, Adjacent Colors, Triad, Tetrad, and Freestyle.
19. Diigo
Diigo is a great tool for web and graphic designers that helps them to easily highlight any part of a web page and add sticky notes to it. What separates it from others on the list is that it can be used as a social bookmarking tool as well where you can tag others and share pages. With Outliner in Diigo, you can structure your research by automated streamlining or by your own personal customization. All thanks to its advanced features, more than 9 million users are already using Diigo.
19. Pixlr
Pixlr is a family of photo editing applications that are quite easy to use. As one of the most amazing tools for web and graphic design people out there, Pixlr offers some amazing quick editing options. From resizing your files to cropping and reshaping them, you can do all that with ease using Pixlr. As a web designer if you are looking for a tool that offers basic functionality for using when you need to accomplish tasks quickly, Pixlr is just perfect!
21. JotForm
Almost every interaction that takes a user from one point to another is realized by forms, and if you are a web designer, chances are you’ll be using forms in most of your pages. Having a well-designed form is important for the page and the overall layout, and it also improves the conversion rate. Well, you can use JotForm, which offers forms that are created in line with form design principles. They are quite easy to create and to have it embedded on your page. You can also connect your forms with other applications with over 30+ JotForm integrations
22. Bannersnack
For times when you need a fast and straightforward, but professional graphic design tool, there is Bannersnack. With an easy to use drag and drop editor, and requiring no drawing or coding skills, this nifty tool makes design accessible to everyone. But don’t be fooled by the name—although they may have started as a banners maker back in 2008, Bannersnack has come a long way since then, transitioning into a cloud-based, collaborative graphic design platform. You can use it to create HTML5, GIFs, or AMPHTML ads and visuals, or even to manage remote design teams, replacing many other high-priced tools.
Whether you’re looking to create animated or static visuals for your next campaign or simplify your workflow, Bannersnack has many features that can help in this respect. From professional templates, design presents, and hand-crafted illustrations, all available at no resale price, or the capability of making up to 40 different-sized visuals simultaneously, this tool comes in handy to more experienced designers too, helping them save time and cut on costs.
23 Iconsout
Iconscout is definitely the best resource for both free and premium design assets. It would be great for those who want to have access to multiple categories of design assets like icons, illustrations, 3d, Lottie animations in a single place.
You can create a free account to begin using Iconscout online directly in your web browser or you can also download the desktop app for your Mac or Windows device.
It provides a huge library of 3.1Million+ Icons, 45K+ Illustrations, 10K+ 3D Assets, 8.5k+ Lottie animations. With a stunning library of design assets contributed by designers and artists from all over the world they also provide integrated tools, plugins, and editors. This helps you with varieties of assets with enough functionality for necessary modifications.
Hardware
1. Pen and paper
The fastest, cheapest, and easiest way to transfer design ideas from your head to the real world is to use good old pen and paper. Besides giving you a chance to stay off the grid for a few moments, analog sketches also serve somewhat like the sacred link between the great graphic artists of the past and the new tech-enabled designers of today.
More importantly, using pen and paper allows you to “intuitively draw” the design concepts in your mind, and quickly discover problems and solutions as your sketches take rudimentary shape. Research even shows that taking notes, doodling, and writing by hand enhances focus, creativity, and openness to learning.
If you’re passionate about this creative method, then go all the way by investing in iconic pencil (Rotring, Faber-Castell, etc) and notebook brands (Moleskine, Field Notes, etc.).
2. Computer
For digital creatives, this is the ultimate tool that performs all the heavy lifting in the profession. If you can afford the best and most powerful — the iMac Pro or the Surface Studio, for example — do so by all means.
The iMac sustains a loyal following of hardcore designers largely by including coolness in its core features. But branding is hardly the whole story. The latest iMac Pro is considered overkill by any standard: having a 27-inch 5K Retina Display, 32-GB memory, a 16-GB graphics card, and an 18-core processor for the high-end variant.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Surface Studio is a worthy rival capable of shifting the balance by giving PC loyalists major bragging rights for (finally) owning something remarkably sleek, powerful, and agile — all in one surprisingly elegant package. You can use it in its traditional desktop mode with a stylishly thin 28-inch PixelSense display; or transform it into a large, touch-screen tablet — an instant digital drawing board — for fast and intuitive designing, especially with the responsive Surface Pen thankfully thrown in to punctuate the statement.
However, if just salivating over these dream workhorses makes your wallet groan, there’s no shame in making do with what the rest of humanity uses. Any decent computer that can adequately handle graphics software and reliably connect to the cloud can sustain your life as a modern-day graphics designer.
3. Stylus and graphics tablet
Creatives who have a dominant tech gene in their DNA will likely prefer the digital equivalent of pencil and paper for their sketching and doodling tasks. When it comes down to it, even their more traditional cousins who sleep with analog pens in hand sometimes seek the souped-up functionalities of an electronic pencil and paper.
So if you find yourself craving a hybrid tool that allows you to continue making hand drawings like a classical artist but using the tools of a tech geek, don’t be embarrassed nor feel that you are betraying the trade. Instead, check out state-of-the-art tools such as the industry standard Wacom tablet/Pro Pen and the versatile iPad Pro in tandem with the Apple Pencil.
Either could simulate the authentic feel of drawing sketches or creating wireframes, in addition to giving you some wicked capabilities (instant color, filters, eraser, storage, superb editing, etc.) that you just can’t execute using ordinary pen and paper.
4. Smartphone
This gadget helps us connect with peers, customers, and the world wide web. It also hosts your favorite apps — including really handy on-the-go drawing and image-editing tools. Plus, the smartphone doubles as a decent camera for unexpected moments when you need one and your sturdy Canon or Nikon is snug as a bug inside its case back at home.
For web designers, a smartphone on hand is also the easiest way to find out whether a specific web page design properly renders on small screens. As can be expected, graphic designers don’t agree on which smartphone model is the best for their profession, but you’ll find loud voices supporting either Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S phones as well as Apple’s latest iPhone iteration.
5. Camera
For creatives who need to take, edit, and manage hyper-precise photos and videos, nothing but a decent DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) will do. And when DSLRs are concerned, two iconic brands — the Canon EOS and Nikon D-series — lead the pack. Both are pricey of course and if budget is a big issue, there are more affordable alternatives in the market that are also capable of capturing pixel-perfect shots.
6. Color space reference
Never settle for counterfeit colors. For the uninitiated, a shade of color that resembles blue might as well be blue, but for design professionals, color accuracy and rendering precision matter big time.
If your work has a significant print component, having a color space reference is a must. The Pantone Matching System is recognized as the industry standard and you can invest in the Formula Guide for nearly 2000 spot colors, the basic Color Bridge Set, or mini Color Swatches depending on your client portfolio and design focus.
7. Monitor calibrator
Another way to control runaway colors is to use monitor calibrators. These devices ensure that the colors you see on your screen will be exactly the same ones that come out in printed outputs such as posters, brochures, and magazines.
X-Rite and Datacolor are the leading monitor calibrator brands, with ColorMunki Smile and Spyder5EXPRESS as their respective entry-level models.
8. Storage
While cloud storage is already available, many graphic designers still opt to have backup physical storage devices close at hand. Because entire libraries of images and videos can easily eat up storage space, you may want to invest in high-capacity, portable models such My PassPort series from Western Digital and MiniStation Extreme NFC from Buffalo.
Choose models with at least a terabyte of storage. Designers who have larger budgets and prefer super-fast plug-and-play processing will likely go for solid state drives (SSD). If you belong to this group, then Samsung’s T3 SSD — which comes with 1-terabyte of storage space — is a good option.
Software
9. Graphic design applications
This is the largest and arguably most important part of a digital artist’s tool stack. Whether installed to run from a desktop computer or offered as a cloud-based service, these software applications enable graphic designers to create, edit, store, and manage their creative output: photos, images, videos, presentations, brochures, and other visual formats.
The Adobe Creative Cloud sets the standard for this tool type, providing a full suite of applications for creating and manipulating raster graphics (Photoshop), vector images (Illustrator), videos (After Effects, Premiere Pro), and different desktop publishing formats such as posters, magazines, brochures, and ebooks (InDesign).
Paid alternatives to specific applications in Adobe’s subscription service include Serif’s Affinity Designer (vector) and Affinity Photo (raster), CorelDRAW (vector), and the macOS-exclusive Sketch (vector).
Free tools with similar capabilities include GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) for authoring and manipulating raster images and Inkscape for creating and editing vector graphics.
10. Online graphic design services
With the advance of cloud computing technology, several companies started offering web-based graphic design services that primarily target general consumers (i.e., non-professional/occasional designers).
Foremost among these providers is Canva, a simple drag-and-drop online tool that allows anyone to quickly author, edit, and share images. The website is perfect for non-designers as well as hardcore creatives occasionally looking for a quick way to create images for various purposes (e.g., blog illustrations, social media posts, etc.) and in various formats (e.g., infographics, presentations, header images, etc.). Snappa offers a similar service and interface, or you might consider Design Wizard to quickly create both images and videos.
Another option is Venngage, a template-based design tool that lets anyone create professional content like business presentations, white papers, reports, marketing materials and more. The tool provides users with access to over 10,000 icons, thousands of stock photos, and tons of customizable charts and graphs.
Additionally, you can use Pixlr for simple photo-editing online; Invision for collaborative screen prototyping; and Artboard Studio for quickly creating product mockups.
11. Graphics repositories
Online libraries of images such as Shutterstock and Behance are great places to visit and get design ideas from. Some of these repositories (such as Pixabay, Pixelify, and Unsplash) even provide free downloadable images you can legally use in your projects.
12. Cloud storage
You have your hard drive and portable storage. That’s well and good, but you still need a space in the cloud to store, synchronize, and manage your design assets, projects, and output. Among other things, cloud storage makes it easier to share and collaborate on design documents, besides being accessible anytime and anywhere — which is hardly the case when you forgot to bring your portable physical drive to work.
Creating a profile or an account for some online services can entitle you to limited cloud storage space. This is the case when you have accounts for Google (Google Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive), and Adobe (Document Cloud). Cloud storage providers such as pCloud, Dropbox, and MediaFire also give free storage space. However, free options generally entitle you to only 1GB to 15GB of free space so you might want to check out subscription fees at these services if you need larger storage.
Instruction, insight, and inspiration
13. Portfolio
Even a humble graphic designer needs to have some form of conceit to show off her creations. Portfolio website services such as Wix, SquareSpace, and Adobe Portfolio (Behance) help designers consolidate and curate the creative efforts they are proud of, and communicate their credentials to prospective employers, clients, and peers. Heck, what better thing to do with artwork than to share it with the world.
If you’re new to the world of graphic design and want to build out your portfolio, sites like Createxplore can help you get connected with charities and small businesses.
14. Training
The field of design is in constant flux as technology, aesthetic standards, and markets shift. This means designers always need to improve their knowledge of the craft and develop new skills that will enable them to produce creative outputs that will remain relevant and meaningful to their intended audiences. Learning portals like GoSkills are great websites to learn new trends and techniques in graphic design.
15. Resource sites
Creatives are arguably the subset of professionals most in need of inspiration. Besides getting that from their immediate environment (hopefully), these professionals can visit design-focused websites that publish advice, tips, and doses of inspirational materials that can help motivate stressed out or low-energy designers. Behance, Abduzeedo, Uncrate, and Google Arts & Culture are some of the best places in cyberspace that can ignite that creative spark in you.
16. Your own workspace/creative nook
Designers differ when it comes to how an inspiring workstation should look like. Some prefer extremely minimalist themes while others clutter their spaces with toys, nostalgic memorabilia, and other eye candies. Depending on your aesthetic sensibilities, transform your workspaces so they can become an integral and proactive component of your workflow. Consider lighting, color schemes, access to windows, and ergonomics when designing and setting up your own creative nook.
Conclusion
It’s easy to find a graphic design tool nowadays, whether it’s a software, a website or a browser extension. So you have a lot of options to choose from depending on what you prefer. The good thing about these online tools is you can use them at no cost. You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars just to get started if you don’t want to.