4 Free Tools to Create Your Own Graphic Designs

Every advertising campaign absolutely needs quality visuals. People are attracted by a style that’s both professional and eye-catching. If hiring a graphic designer lies outside your price range, these free online tools can help you create a professional visual or flyer on your own.

Free graphic design tools

Canva

Canva is currently the most popular free tool—and it can literally do everything. With its huge library of templates of all kinds and styles, it allows you to modify everything according to your style preference and needs: fonts, background, images, etc. You can even share your creations with your team so they can edit them in turn. When you’re ready, you can download your graphics as JPGs, PDFs or PNGs. What’s more, there’s no download limit.

Easelly

Like Canva, Easelly allows you to edit your creations together with your team and download them as JPGs, PDFs or PNGs—also with no download limit.

Piktochart

Piktochart allows you to create computer graphics with a wide variety of customizable templates. While you can import your own photos or icons into your templates, you’re limited to a certain number of templates with the free plan. You also can’t download a high-resolution version of them. However, you still have access to a choice of JPG, PDF or PNG versions.

Venngage

The advantage of Venngage is that it allows you to import data from an Excel spreadsheet. This is extremely useful when you need to format a large amount of data. You’re given the option of downloading your creations as PDFs or JPGs. However, just like with Piktochart, you’re limited in your number of downloads.

Summary

All these free tools are quite similar: each has an interface with choices of icons and templates, a text toolbar, choices of fonts and background, etc. You’ll need to create an account to use them so you can keep all your designs and be able to edit them.

It’s up to you to choose the tool that best meets your needs. They all allow you to either start from scratch and let your imagination run wild or simply pick a template and modify it to your liking. And they all allow you to customize any template.

Graphic design tips

When creating your graphics, it’s important to follow a few graphic design rules.

Keep it simple and get right to the point! Don’t create an image that’s too busy—only include what’s absolutely necessary. Don’t use too many colors. Instead, choose a colour palette with a maximum of 3 colours and then respect your choice.

Make sure your text is legible, too, so it’s crystal clear to your customers at a glance. You can achieve this effect with a highly contrasted background and text, and sufficiently large text. In general, you should plan on using at least a 12-point font.

In addition, make sure to create a design that’s big enough to respect the requested dimensions. With too few pixels, a design will be blurry—which means it will be difficult to read and unattractive to your customers. And a design with the wrong dimensions will likely end up being truncated or stretched, and that’s definitely not what you want.

Here are some examples of well-done designs. They’re attractive, clean and simple, and stick to their color palette. They immediately convey what they’re about.

Now you’re ready to start creating your own designs! Give it a try—the more you practice, the better your creations will become. And it’s always wise to ask for feedback before you launch your campaign. Need help creating your visual? Contact one of our experts!

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