10 Tools That Most Graphic Designers Use

Graphic design is more than just creating beautiful imagery. It is also a valuable form of communication that businesses can use to connect with the audience. Graphics are crucial at every stage of the marketing process, so it is important to have the best tools for graphic designers.

For the sake of marketing, designers are often pressured to create a lot of graphics for brands. It is for this reason that many of them have switched to doing digital art instead of the traditional methods of using pen and paper.

Many organizations rely on graphic designers for marketing initiatives. With most people on the internet, a lot of the graphics design processes are done online. Taking the process digitally makes it easier for companies to launch their marketing efforts.

This is precisely why it is necessary to have access to the best tools for graphic designers. You need to have an edge over the growing competition and be able to offer stunning content for the target audience.

10 Highly Recommended Tools for Designers

In a sea of graphic design tools, it is a must that you choose those that can help you unleash your creativity. These design tools are what most graphic designers recommend:

1. Kittl: Ready-to-Use Templates

If you need to create plenty of graphics fast, Kittl has everything that you need from magical design tools to precision editing features. But the most impressive thing about this tool is the professional-quality templates feature.

There are thousands of design templates that you can customize to fit your brand. You can apply several text effects, such as shading, decoration, and transformation, to make the text parts look amazing. Additionally, you can add illustrations from its massive vector illustrations library, including shapes, banners, badges, and more. There is also a premium photo collection of over 3 million high-resolution photos. Of course, you can also upload custom graphics if you want to use branded elements in your design.

The pricing structure of Kittl depends on your needs. The Pro plan at $10 a month gives you access to premium content plus 1GB of upload space, which is already great for individuals who need advanced editing tools. The Expert plan at $24 and Business plan at $79 monthly are perfect for teams and professionals who want more upload space and unlimited projects done. Higher plans also have additional features, like advanced customer support, branding, and team features.

2. Removal.AI: Auto Background Remover

Working with images can be tiring, especially when you need to remove backgrounds from each photo. Although expert graphic artists can easily do so in minutes, the process is monotonous and will take a lot of time when you have to edit a couple of photos for your design project. This is why Removal.AI is simply one of the best tools for graphic design. It allows you to remove backgrounds in seconds. All you need is to upload the photo and the app instantly works its magic on it. The best part is that it can handle multiple photos at once with its batch processing feature. It would be cool to have all your photos prepped up in minutes instead of wasting hours doing everything manually.

As for the pricing, Removal.AI gives you the freedom to choose how much credit to pay in a month. Let’s say you need to edit only up to 40 images per month, then you will just pay $5.99 or only $0.15 per image. The price per image gets cheaper with the more credits you purchase.

3. Flexitive: Omnichannel Design Production and Distribution

Creating designs is already challenging as it is and the job gets even more difficult when you need to create designs for multiple platforms. Different platforms, in social media, for example, mean you need to create content that will follow each platform’s specifications. This can be a little too much for those who are not too familiar with other types of social media. Other than the unfamiliar environment, it is also time-consuming to manually create content in different formats. Good thing that we now have access to the best tools for graphic designers, like Flexitive.

Flexitive is powered by advanced design automation technology that lets you scale visual communications easily. You can create professional designs that can be published across all channels. You do not have to worry about file sizes and formats since it lets you create design variations to improve engagement.

With its ability to generate design variations, you can launch seamless distribution that will export your designs directly to specific platforms. It also helps you streamline your workflow with custom templates to ensure design consistency and quick execution.

Small teams who need an omnichannel design production and distribution can choose to have the Teams plan at only $59 per user per month and billed annually. It includes plenty of premium perks, like 100 GB per user cloud storage space, access to the design library, and other cool features.

4. Creasquare - Creative Studio: Create visual content for social media easily

Creasquare - Creative Studio is a comprehensive web-based tool used by creative professionals to collaborate on projects and manage their work.

Users love Creasquare because it’s intuitive and easy to use; it offers a wealth of features that allow for greater collaboration and productivity. With cloud storage options, task management features, and a clean, modern interface, Creasquare makes it easy to track projects and keep everyone on the same page. It also provides robust security features so users can rest assured their data is safe—and that their project files won’t be accessible to anyone outside of their team.

Creasquare has generated a lot of buzz among creative professionals, and for good reason: it’s easy to use, reliable, and packed with features. So if you’re looking for a tool that can help you stay organized and productive while working on creative projects, look no further than Creasquare Creative Studio. It has everything you need to take your projects to the next level!

5. Easil: Designing on-brand assets

When launching online marketing campaigns, it is essential that you keep everything on-brand. The audience must not be confused about the personality that you want them to see. You can help them get familiar with your brand if you build a strong brand presence with consistent branding.

Achieving brand consistency is crucial if you want your digital marketing efforts to work. It is already challenging to keep designs cohesive on your own, especially so if you are working with a team.

Easil is a nifty little tool to ensure that you are in control of the design approval workflow. This means that you can specify which design elements can be edited by other members. It ensures that non-designer teammates cannot mess up the designs. This is important since you need to protect brand integrity by having consistent branding across your marketing assets.

The Easil Plus plan at $7.50 per user per month lets you access creative design tools for a small team. You also have an option for the Edge plan at $59 per user per month which comes with Easil’s Edge Design Guarantee. A tailored package is also possible if you want a dedicated account manager to work with you.

6. Renderforest: All-in-One Design Tools

Design creation is one of the tedious works of graphic designers. It can be challenging to regularly come up with a new design and have to work on it for hours. Thankfully, there are graphic design tools online that aid designers in this task. Renderforest is a neat tool to have, especially if you need to create high-quality designs. It is an all-in-one tool to create designs for presentations, logos, websites, mockups, and even intro videos.

Running a social media campaign? Then you will love Renderforest for its stunning social media templates. Create engaging content with plenty of customizable designs that are categorized into different industries.

Premium plans for Renderforest tools range from $9.99 to $29.99 a month. You may also try it for free and have access to templates, scenes, and presets plus 500 MB of storage.

7. Designstripe: Create and Customize Illustrations

Illustrations are commonly used in marketing and branding because they are effective tools for communicating messages. Designstripe is a delightful tool that unleashes limitless creativity when designing illustrations. Although you can start from scratch, using Designstripe is much smarter since it has plenty of templates that you can customize according to your design specifications.

The team is made up of talented individuals from different countries so you can expect to see a diverse set of illustration templates. This will benefit designers who like to experiment with new design techniques and explore more design possibilities.

Renderforest is so affordable, price-wise, since you can get full access to all illustration styles at only $20 a month.

8. Drawkit.com: Hand-drawn Illustrations

Creating beautiful hand-drawn illustrations is easy with Drawkit. Technically, Drawkit is a collection of hand-drawn vector illustrations that you can customize. The beauty of its illustrations collection is that they look more personalized because of the hand-drawn styling.

For Drawkit’s subscription plans, the basic plan is free but is limited to what content you can access. It is highly recommended that you get the Pro Lifetime plan for a one-time payment of only $295. This gives you unlimited access to Pro content forever. You may also have the Pro plan at $79 a year.

9. Desyner: Breath-taking motion graphics

Animated designs are becoming a favorite type of content among many social media users because they are fun, interactive, and sophisticated. Desyner allows you to get creative with your visuals and produce motion graphics on the fly. Animate your design in seconds with its animation templates. There are a lot of animation styles to choose from and you will create impressive animated videos and gifs like a pro.

You can get Desyner Pro+ for as low as $4.95 per month, billed annually, and create unlimited animations plus access to all premium design templates. This plan also allows you to have up to 5 members for free so your small team can collaborate in making designs using this amazing tool.

10. Khroma: AI color tool for designers

Color is one of the most important elements in a design. Colors have meanings and it is crucial that you have to use them well in your designs. When creating branded graphics, it is also essential to have all the colors right or you will risk creating a different persona for your brand.

Khroma is a convenient tool to create custom color palettes. It allows you to organize a set of colors that you have to use on every design project. If you are up for something fun, you can also use Khroma to create killer color combos.

Takeaway

Designers often carry the burden of making marketing strategies work. After all, their designs are what people see on the surface. It is their responsibility to create graphics that make the audience take a look, become interested, and be convinced to buy the products.

With almost every business going digital, it is a must to be armed with the best tools for graphic designers to bring the best design ideas to life. You need to be smart with which graphic design software to use because it is what will let you create illustrations, presentations, artistic layouts, and the most attractive social media content.

With the right design tools, you can make powerful designs that will not only look impressive but will also serve their purpose in the marketing funnel.

What Graphic Design Tools Would You Recommend?

With the right design tools, designers can improve productivity in graphics creation. In a way, the best tools for graphic design can also help industries in scaling up their businesses because they get to achieve their goals more quickly.

The design industry continuously grows and the competition gets tougher by the minute. As a modern designer, you need to work smarter, not harder. The best tools for graphic designers are designed not only to elevate the design quality but also to allow designers to be more productive. They are made to help designers create the best designs but minus the tedious process. With such tools, designers can afford to explore their creativity with more options to innovate their designs.