six design tools your marketing team will love

Is content creation for your website, social media channels and marketing materials part of your overall marketing strategy? And if so, do you wish you could make it look better and more consistent?

In an ideal world, you’d work with a professional design agency to produce on-brand, slick and effective creative content. But we know it’s not always possible to call the pros in for every single piece of content you need.

So, we’ve compiled a list of our six favourite (and free!) design tools to help marketers like you enhance your visuals.

1. Canva

Canva offers an array of customisable templates, images and illustrations, to help you create social media graphics, posters, presentations and other documents quickly and easily. The free version provides access to over 8,000 templates and a whole host of free photos and graphics. You can even connect your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to Canva, so you can post your newly created images direct to your feeds.

2. Pablo

Pablo, created by the social media management platform ‘Buffer’, is a great tool for creating images for your social media. It allows you to add text, filters and even your own logo to images and save out the files for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, all at the click of a button. You can either upload your own imagery or choose from their library of over 600,000 stock images.

3. Adobe Color

Finding the right combination of colours isn’t easy. It takes a lot of trial, error and testing. That’s why, when you’re creating your brand colour palette it’s important to work with a design agency, who’ll be able to establish colour values for screen, web, print and other things such as signage, to ensure that your colours are consistent across everything.

But, if you’re looking for help figuring out what colour combinations to use on your marketing materials or social media images, then Adobe Color is a great tool to use. Pick a colour on the colour wheel, and it’ll show you a suite of complementary colours, along with their RGB colour references. It’ll also tell you whether there are any accessibility issues with your chosen colours, for example if it’s ‘colour blind safe’ or not.

4. Squoosh

Got the perfect image for your social media post, but the file size is just too big? Then head over to Squoosh. It allows you to upload your image, resize, adjust the quality and even save out as a different file type. This means you can compress your images ready for using online and on your social media, without having to invest in expensive image manipulation software, such as Adobe Photoshop.

5. GIPHY

GIPHY is a widely used tool for sourcing and creating animated GIFs for social media. It’s really easy to use too. You simply upload a photo, or video, choose the animation speed, add some text or effects and then generate your GIF, ready to share on your social media.

6. Google Fonts

Fonts are an important part of any brand, so it’s worth using your established typeface and following your brand guidelines. However, if you’re looking to create something a little different, or need to add an extra element into your images, such as a quote in a nice handwritten font, then Google Fonts is a great place to look. It offers a library of free licensed fonts, which you can download, install, and use.