As any great designer or digital artist knows, having the appropriate tools can greatly increase their power. Here are 10 essential graphic design tools that will help you amaze clients and impress peers:
PhotoDirector is an all-in-one image manipulation software with an intuitive user interface, guided edits and express templates. Furthermore, its Symbols feature ensures consistency across designs.
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is an extremely powerful program, perfect for both novice photographers looking to edit recent photographs as well as professional graphic designers creating advertisements, logos, and marketing pieces. With its diverse tools and palettes allowing for basic editing tasks as well as advanced retouching techniques and composite imaging.
This program’s layers and masking functions enable non-destructive editing by isolating various elements from an image, while offering precise editing tools and digital painting capabilities. Furthermore, this application supports numerous file formats and has an extensive set of filters designed to enhance photographs or artworks.
Additional capabilities of the application include being able to track changes through a history panel and multiple editing states for non-linear editing. It also features customizable menu styles so designers can apply different settings depending on the project they’re working on.
Inkscape
Inkscape is an excellent free vector editor and a worthy alternative to Adobe Illustrator, supporting scalable vector graphics (which won’t blur when resized), advanced features like layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, path-based text, circumfluent object text editing and direct XML editing as well as providing access to various patterns and gradients.
Inkscape is a versatile software program used to design logos, icons and shapes for web and print use. Additionally, Inkscape supports animation creation as well as CMYK color and vector formats, while providing patterns suitable for cutting machines or laser engravers.
Inkscape provides tools for writing and editing text, including font size and style selections, kerning, spacing and rotation. Bezier curves as well as Spiro curves can also be edited for precision editing, while it also has clones as well as transparency effects like opacity and alpha transparency effects that can be added with this software. Moreover, its user interface can be adjusted according to your needs for optimal text editing experience.
Vectr
Vectr is a free graphics software designed to enable you to easily and intuitively create vector graphics. Available both online and desktop cross-platform, Vectr offers many features such as pan-and-zoom functionality at 60fps, live gradient and effects previews and advanced grids; as well as keyboard shortcuts and advanced grids. Plus, layer groups and colour tagging make organising documents even simpler!
The tool offers a standard set of shapes, including rectangle, circle and rounded-corner rectangle. In addition to text tools and an inline panel that contains more shapes positioned a click away. However, its lack of alignment or snapping indicators may be disappointing but these deficiencies can easily be overcome with knowledge of X/Y coordinate system.
Vectr offers an innovative real-time collaborative feature, enabling multiple users to work on the same file simultaneously.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is an affordable graphic design program compatible with any system and offering numerous tools for creative work. Popular for creating logos, promotional or branded content, icons and digital artwork as well as advanced features to simplify or speed up specific design tasks and manipulate assets, it has quickly become one of the go-to programs in business or for personal projects alike.
Adobe Illustrator excels at producing vector graphics. In contrast to raster-based formats such as GIFs, JPEGS and TIFF files that use pixels as pixels instead of mathematically defined lines and curves to form objects, vector images use mathematically defined lines and curves which allow for scaleability of any size without loss in image quality.
Adobe Illustrator is an extremely popular choice for print design. Its scalability and precise control over typography makes it the ideal tool for creating posters, billboards and other printed materials with precise typography control. Furthermore, there is an impressive library of fonts as well as shape tools available for creating custom shapes.
Canva
Canva is an accessible graphic design tool with easy user navigation and simple templates for any project, plus an opportunity for users to design their own. There is both a free version and a paid one with more features; both can be utilized across desktop and mobile devices.
Drag-and-drop editing makes working with images, layouts, text and elements simple and efficient. Plus, access millions of free stock photos and elements; its Magic Resize feature automatically resizes images to their optimal sizes for each platform!
Canva is an excellent tool for social media managers looking to produce engaging graphics for their brands. With its array of templates, Canva makes creating captivating posts easy while staying on brand. Plus, users can download and share designs easily; all while helping increase brand recognition and sales!
Diigo
Diigo is an information and data organization tool, that annotates web pages, shares resources with others and engages in discussions over them. With its powerful search engine allowing users to quickly locate any page saved to Diigo; multiple ways of highlighting text or adding sticky notes; privacy settings as well as multiple ways of tracking usage statistics all add up.
Students can leverage Diigo’s group and list features to collaborate on research projects with classmates. Through its social bookmarking feature, they can also easily share websites with other Diigo users – making it simple for teachers to share a website with an entire class or subset of students.
This tool’s highlighting and sticky note functions allow students to draw attention to important parts of a web page while providing feedback through inline comments. These features are especially effective when teaching or learning online courses.
