3 free design tools to use in digital marketing
When you are just starting out with your digital marketing journey and want to learn the fundamentals of creating engaging and stunning designs, you might not want to invest much money initially. Luckily, great free tools are available, or at least tools with generous free tiers that allow you to experiment with creating your first digital marketing designs for your online business.
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Why do you need design tools?
Design tools allow you to create digital marketing material, which can be used for marketing your brand, products, or services online, for example, on social media or your blog. Many design tools allow you to create graphics and images that will make your brand stand out from the crowd.
Today, it is almost necessary to continuously create new engaging marketing material if you want to invest in your brand’s online presence. Most social media platforms and your blog require at least some graphic material, for which you need design tools.
Best free design tools and software
While there are many premium design tools, such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, the leading design tools on the market, you don’t necessarily have to invest such large sums of money to create beautiful and engaging digital marketing material. Below is a rundown of the top completely free design tools you can start using right away without a credit card to create new and fresh digital marketing designs for your brand.
Canva
Canva is the most beginner-friendly design tool to kickstart your digital marketing campaign without much digital marketing skills or knowledge. Canva has many free templates to choose from for all your digital marketing needs, including social media templates, business templates, custom prints, video, and education templates.
While Canva can’t compete with professional design tools such as Photoshop or Illustrator, it is straightforward to use if you are not a professional graphic designer.
There are well enough features, templates, fonts, and design elements to choose from to create very professional-looking designs in minutes. Once you start catching up to using Canva, you can easily upgrade to their Pro tier, giving you a 30-day free trial to experiment with all the Pro features that Canva offers.
Canva also has a native app for iOS and Android as well as Windows and macOS. You can also always access Canva using your favorite browsers.
Photopea
Photopea is a great, completely free design tool for little more advanced graphic design work that reflects what Photoshop has to offer. Photopea is excellent for creating high-detailed vector graphics completely free through your browser. While there are some templates to kickstart your designs in Photopea, that isn’t necessarily the primary use case of Photopea software.
Photopea allows you to create and edit advanced design files, such as .PSD, .AI, .XD, .sketch, .SVG, and many more as well, making it a unique freemium software to use.
Pixlr
Pixlr is another freemium design tool that falls somewhere between Canva and Photopea when looking at its features and usecases. Pixlr has an extensive collection of templates and many advanced features to edit your designs on the go. Pixlr has much more advanced features than Canva, but not nearly as many as Photopea. Pixlr’s collection of freemium templates is also nothing compared to Canva’s library but is much bigger than Photopea’s.
Pixlr is also suitable for creating and editing some vector graphics such as SVG, but it is not capable of working with .PSD, .AI, or .XD file formats.
Pixlr also has a Premium plan available, unlocking the entire Pixlr library of templates, premium AI photo editing features, mobile app features for advanced social media designs, and much more.
Conclusion
Whether you are just starting out experimenting with digital marketing and graphic design for your online business, or you are already an experienced graphic designer, sometimes using freemium software, such as the ones listed in this post, is enough for your needs.
The best options for more experienced graphic designers who want more freedom with their designs would be Pixlr or Photopea, depending on your needs.
If you are just starting out, look no further than Canva, as it has everything you will need for a long time when you are looking for beginner-friendly software to make quick designs and digital marketing material for your online business.