What is graphic design? Graphics is something that helps you in creating something which you would want to create. Graphic is basically an image or an illustration in the computer world. These can be found in in-depth research, in-depth analysis, planning, and execution. If we talk about the definition then this is best for displaying information in a way that’s easily understandable by all groups of people. Basically, these help people to visualize complex data.
Graphics (or graphic design) is the art and technique concerned with the communication and presentation of ideas or visual representations using two-dimensional images or multi-dimensional objects. The purpose of graphics is to assist communication, information processing, consideration, and expression.
Graphic design is a method of communication. The goal is to create visuals that send a message and influence the audience. Graphic design such as logo design, brochure design, or flyer design uses symbols and images to trigger an emotional response from the viewer. There are so many fields in graphic design.
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 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
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
Sketch
Sketch is a Mac-only graphic design program that focuses mainly on digital design. These digital designs are used to create websites, apps, and interfaces. Unlike Photoshop, Sketch isn’t built for photo editing or print work. With Sketch, you can create a prototype by collaborating with other designers on the platform itself. The program has a smart layout feature in which the component will automatically resize based on the content. There are hundreds of plugins in the software which will let you do vector editing and other design work with precision down to the pixel. Digital icons are another thing that can be created through this software. Sketch, on the downside, is not great for print design or illustrations.
Platform: Mac
Affinity Designer
The Affinity Designer is a cheaper alternative to illustrator, which is especially suitable for someone who is in the early stage of a design career. The software is known to work smoothly, which can improve your workflow and make you express your creativity more freely. You can move and zoom your artwork at 60fps; see the gradients, effects, and adjustments changing live along with the transforms and curve edits.
Affinity Designer lets you work on both vector and raster workspaces, and you can switch between them easily. This software can work on any device, and you can create unlimited artboards within it. Affinity designer provides a graphic design app for the iPad with the same features offered on the desktop versions. Advanced color controls are provided where you can work in RGB or LAB color spaces with up to 32-bits per channel. You can find a wide range of toolsets in the program which can be used to achieve a high level of accuracy and productivity. The grids and guides are fully customizable, where you can change the spacing, sub-divisions, gutters, angles, etc. Another powerful feature of Affinity designer is that you get floating-point accuracy by zooming your artwork, even by more than a million per cent.
Xara Designer Pro X
Xara Designer is built for both bitmaps and vectors. The program can handle desktop publishing, graphic design, illustration, photo editing, all in one place. The graphic design software provides you with hundreds of template layouts, design elements, and over a million archive photos to get you started quickly. While drawing any shape, lines, or curves using vectors, you would not face any loss in quality when you scale it up. You can create custom design elements and use them in any of your designs. Tools like gradients, outlines, and transparency in the software will give your artwork a special touch.
Platform: Windows
Gravit Designer
Gravit Designer is a free vector design application that’s great for logo making, photo manipulation, illustrations and animations. You can use Gravit online with their cloud-based software—though some reviews claim that it runs a bit slower than the locally-installed version. The layout is sleek and fully customizable, but Gravit Designer Pro is no longer free ($49 per year).
Pros:
- Plenty of features and capabilities
- Cloud program is great
Cons:
- Free version not nearly as effective as Pro
Inkscape
There’s something beautiful about a good community. Inkscape’s user base is passionate and helpful, with this cross-platform software bringing out the best of open-source design. Users can put together good-looking graphics and designs with the breadth of learning resources available. However, a steep learning curve, clunky interface, and less-than-stellar Mac version keep Inkscape from being a perfect program.
Pros:
- Lots of filters
- Helpful website and community
Cons:
- Can run slow
- Steep learning curve
Vectr
Accessed through your web browser or its standalone app, Vectr is great for designing (you guessed it) vector images. For high-end designers, Vectr likely doesn’t have all of the features you’ll want. But casuals and amateurs alike will find the low learning curve attractive. Plus, there are dozens of tutorials available on their website for newbies.
Pros:
- Very beginner friendly
- Good selection of tutorial videos
Cons:
- A bit limited in capabilities
- Clunky sign-up process
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is more than just a graphic design tool that is perfect for illustrative artwork, page layouts, corporate logos, website mockups, and almost anything else as per the requirement. Moreover, it’s an industry benchmark in vector creation tools.
Key Features:
- High-customizability: Adobe Illustrator is highly customizable through multiple preset layouts along with other customizability options. Users can leverage the drag and drop feature to move panels anywhere on the screen.
- In-Panel Editing: Its in-panel editing feature allows designers to edit multiple artboards simultaneously to help designers work with more efficiency.
- Highly Compatible: It is highly compatible with numerous devices that have different configurations from Mac and Windows.
- User Interface: Its user interface is highly accessible and customizable. It offers custom viewing and space-saving features to help you work on any machine.
Pros:
- Instead of stored pixels, it generates graphics based on mathematical equations to ensure crisp and sharp lines that you can print in any dimension
- It creates graphics files in relatively small sizes so that designers can share them easily through a simple email attachment
- You get access to over 90 million images, graphics, templates, and videos from Adobe Stock
- Use Adobe font integration to select thousands of fonts and implement the most suitable font for the project
- Tight integration with other Adobe products
Cons:
- It is costlier in comparison to other vector-based graphic design tools
- So many features can look a bit overwhelming for new users. It requires a steep learning curve to use it efficiently
- It could eat up a lot of space on your machine
Conclusion
The computer age introduced many designer jobs to the market all over the world today. The graphic design industry was not only affected by these new technological tools but likewise by computerization. These days, software programs are used in nearly every step of the design process.