Top Tools To Be Your Own Designer

It was around December. The winters were chilly, diwali had just passed, the preparations for new year were done and most of our design team had gone to their hometowns for holidays.

One find afternoon, I got a call from my CEO where I was informed of a partner meet that had been scheduled next week. I was presented with a brief where a lot had to be done. Backdrops had to be printed, posters, standees, leaflets, danglers and what not, including attractive product videos.

"An unplanned event, when most of my design team was on a planned leave. and so I decided to be my own designer"

Here is a list of few key tools that helped me deliver in a situation which seemed impossible to overcome.

1. Canva - Guess where the header of this blog post is made from?

Canva is the go-to design tool if you are not experience with photoshop. It has a clean and intuitive interface with lots of editing options. It gives the perfect basic solution to create website banners, advertisement banners, ,logo, social media post, social media banners, social media videos and print options like visiting cards, flyers, labels, gift certificates, coupons. On top of that you can also design report covers, CV and resumes and so much more with just a few clicks. With features like that, Canva is the go-to tool for any new age professional like marketer, advertiser, HR, Finance professionals, entrepreneurs basically everyone. Available on windows, android, iPhone and web interface, that allows you to work on the same file from anywhere on any tool. Other similar tools that would help you in terms of different templates library are stencil and design wizard pro. More or less like Canva, though they have a few unique features each. Check them out.

• GIMP - Photoshop too deep for your pockets? Search no more! Native to Linux operating system Gimp is an open source image editor with highly advanced functions. It has capabilities where it can easily go neck to neck with Adobe Photoshop.

However, it does have a learning curve to it. The plus point is, that it is not too complicated and being open source, is absolutely free of cost to use. If mastered, gimp is an invaluable tool each and every one. It is the perfect platform to plot your creativity into graphic design with ac-curacies that matter to you. It is available to download for windows, MAC OS and Linux.

• Visme - Your go-to-tool for infographics. Need I say more? An intuitive and easy to use tool to create infographics. Great drag and drop interface. A must try for marketers, researchers and trades where infographics are the key to business. What's more is that it also helps you to create presentations but more impressively, chart and maps. How cool is that?

Try it and let me know if it was helpful in the comments.

• Google Web Designer - HTML5 creatives made easy AF! Google really did it with this one. They created a tool for marketers to easily create HTML5 graphics without the need of a designer. These ads are used on web pages and display ads. What they have done is to give the ability to create interactive, engaging and aminated ads with precise tracking abilities, with few clicks, drags and drops, by anyone and everyone; even those who do no understand a single line of coding.

I am pretty sure that web designers aren't exactly happy about this but it is how it is and they will have to just accept the fact that they are not needed anymore; not for HTML5 creatives anyway

• Adobe Color - Color choosing guide for everyone! Most of us reading us understand that colors in a design are important but unfortunately, are not trained to choose the right ones from the color pallet. Adobe color is the tool that helps you choose that. It gives you the power to choose the right colors in accordance with the WCAG or Web Content Accessibility guideline. You can also drop an image and extract the color theme from it in a matter of seconds and let you select colors from it according to different moods. As if all that was not enough, it also gives a contrast checker for you to choose optimal colors.

It's basically like getting free color advice from a seasoned art director in a few clicks. I am wondering why such an amazing tool is free but it just is. For all the things that I hate Adobe for, this is the one that makes me fall in love with their expertise.

• Mass Image Compressor - Does exactly what the title says. Ever been in a situation where you had to compress dozens of images in one go? A good example is high res images from a DSLR camera that need to go to gallery section on a website or as attachments to an email. While you can use online tools to compress them but uploading 100 images of 23-30 MB each for compression, is far from an ideal situation. Introducing, mass image compressor. Just download, install, set the parameters, select the folder, click and enjoy a cup of coffee.

Let our mass image compressor do its thing for you. Before you finish your big cup of joe, this tool will have your images ready for the go.

While there are many other tools out there, these are the ones that I personally trust and use to get my everyday done.

What are yours?

Let me know in the comments.