Tag: design

Designing has become an essential skill in today’s growing digital world. If you are a content creator, graphic designer, or website builder, in a world where the attention span keeps getting shorter and shorter, you need to know how to create catchy visuals. This will grab the attention of your audience and make them take a look at your message.

However, not everyone has the skills or experience to create professional-looking designs on their own. That’s where DIY design tools come in. These tools allow non-designers to create high-quality designs without the need to hire a professional or invest in expensive design software.

Designing should not necessarily require you to invest so much time into learning everything. With so many tools and sources available on the net, one can learn to create stunning visuals in no time. Get your message to your audience on any platform. You can be a non-designer and still get amazing results for creating graphics with the design tools listed in this blog below.

So without further ado, let’s dive into the top 15 easy-to-use DIY design tools for non-designers in 2023!

Let’s look at the top 15 DIY tools for non-designers

1. Adobe Express
2. Canva
3. Stencil
4. PicMonkey
5. Gimp
6. Figma
7. Visme
8. Photopea
9. Google Slides
10. Unsplash
11. Freepik
12. Prezi
13. Piktochart
14. Coolors
15. DaFont

1. Adobe Express

Formerly known as Adobe Spark available for both Android and iOS, the Adobe Express app lets you create visuals for flyers, graphics, social media platforms, logos, and more.

With thousands of templates to choose from, create pictures, videos, and animated videos that are optimized for Instagram along with access to the Adobe Stock collection that has royalty-free images Adobe Fonts, icons, backgrounds, and more.

They also have easy-to-use guided tools that enable you to quickly remove the background. Resize with just a tap and share directly to any social platform or convert to GIF.

You can use Adobe Express to create animated video posts and share social stories. You’ll get the Photoshop-quality look you want with thousands of effects, filters, textures, and overlays. You can create text effects and apply your brand to your design with one tap.

Important features of Adobe Express:

• You can schedule your content to post on social media if you are a content creator.
• The combine files option allows you to convert multiple files into one.
• Webpage builder.

Pricing Details:

Adobe Express gives you a 30-day free trial version. But with a paid membership, you can unlock many more features such as premium templates, 20,000 licensed Adobe Fonts, 160 million royalty-free images, branding, 100GB of storage, and more. Pricing details of the premium plan are given below:

2. Canva

Canva has become the go-to platform for creating any design. You don’t have to be a pro at designing to use Canva, non designers can also create high-quality designs with no effort. Canva also has an app that makes it easy to design what you need on the go.

You can design for various mediums including photos, videos, GIFs, and more. You can make posts for different social media platforms, and create college posters, greeting cards, logos, and business cards with free templates that are easy to customize.

Moreover, you can also deliver precise presentations which can also be tailored to your needs. Enhance your photographs using filters, stickers, and effects to adjust brightness, saturation, tint, blur, crop, flip, and more.

Make a video and add music to it, resize, crop, flip, and not only that but your voice-over. Put animations and transitions. Canva comes with a free content library. Giving you access to free high-resolution images, audio and music tracks, and other graphic design elements.

You can collaborate with others in real-time, and you can create mock-ups. Even
schedule your posts for social media platforms with Canva pro. Canva is a complete package for all content creators, students, teachers, and more.

Important features of Canva:

• Brand Kit, allows you to create and store your specialized brand logos, fonts, and lines.
• You can remove the background from videos as well.
• Easy-to-use photo editing tools and filters.
• Seamless security and SSO integration.
• Social media content scheduling to 8 platforms.

Pricing Details:

Canva Free provides all the standard tools you need to design on your own or with collaborators. Canva Pro is for individuals and freelance designers who want unlimited access to premium tools and content and Canva Teams allow teams of all sizes to collaborate easily. Pricing details of the paid plans are given below:

3. Stencil

Stencil is a very well-known graphic designing tool on the web. It has more than 352000 users and has been featured on websites like We Work Buffer, and CNN Entrepreneur magazine. Stencil is used by business owners, social media marketers, bloggers, and entrepreneurs. Stencil makes creating an image and adding text and background to it super easy.

Stencil offers many royalty-free stock images, templates, icons, and graphics. You can also create visuals for different brands easily and you can upload and store various versions of your logos.

It has custom-made presents for social networks, ads, blog posts, and more. The tool brings you more than 5000 Google online fonts. Moreover, you can also create your own presets and upload your own fonts.

Important features of Stencil:

• The stencil has high-resolution 3,100,000+ icons for use.
• The color picker is highly user-friendly.
• You can instantly resize your images.
• Create, preview and share images in seconds.

Pricing Details:

Stencil offers a Free plan for the hobbyist. And, two paid plans i.e. Pro and Unlimited. Paid plans come with a 7-day money-back guarantee. Pricing details of the paid plans are given below:

4. PicMonkey

Owned by Shutterstock, PicMonkey is available as both a website and an app. This photo editing and design platform helps create standout visuals that make a point, express your views, and leave a lasting impression – no art degree required.

Be it for Instagram posts, Facebook covers, YouTube thumbnails, web pages, holiday cards, posters, or just about anything with a visual. Their image editing tools compete across digital and real-life domains, catering to both designers and non-designers alike.

The designing tool has a community of 1.8 million contributors, and Shutterstock adds hundreds of thousands of images each week. It currently has more than 380 million images and more than 22 million video clips available.

Important features of PicMonkey:

• Powerful photo editing tools to crop, resize, and adjust color and exposure.
• Easy to use graphic design templates for pro results.
• Hundreds of collage layouts for customization.
• Video clips addition in to your designs.

Pricing Details:

Stencil offers three paid plans i.e. Basic, Pro, and Business. Paid plans come with a 7-day free trial.

Basic – Powerful photo editing and design; best for rising creators.

Pro – Unlimited storage, brand fonts; best for growing businesses.

Business – The power of Pro plus collaboration tools.

Pricing details of the paid plans are given below:

5. Gimp

Gimp was started by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis in 1995. The image manipulation program is available to download for various cross platforms including macOS, GNU/ Linux, Windows, and more. GIMP provides powerful tools for whatever job you may have, whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist.

Gimp is a free and open-source image editor designed for photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. The main website also contains tutorials for beginners, photo editing, painting, programming, and more to do yourself. Ideal for retouching images, and its clone tool is its strongest feature.

Important features of Gimp:

• A complete range of painting tools, such as Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, and Clone.
• Super strong gradient editing and combining tool.
• Transformation tools such as rotation, scaling, shearing, and flipping.
• A highly advanced tool for making Bezier and polygonal selections.
• Advanced scripting features.

6. Figma

Figma is the web-based design platform designed to help teams create products collaboratively. Enabling you to design in a flexible, systematic manner and easily use your assets with their drag-and-drop feature. Automating and augmenting your work with plugins. Allows you to build a responsive website with an auto layout.

With so many features coming into play, Figma can be a bit overwhelming for a complete beginner at designing. We recommend having a basic hands-on experience with some design tools even as a non-designer.

Important features of Figma

• The ability to build prototypes and test.
• Smooth transfer of projects to customers.
• Constant upgradation of plugins.
• Centralized file management.
• Design system analytics.

Pricing Details:

Figma offers a Starter plan for Free. And, two paid plans i.e. Figma Professional and Figma Organization. Figma Professional plan is free for students and educators. Pricing details of the paid plans are given below:

7. Visme

Visme prides itself on not simply being a tool, but rather it is the all-in-one design platform for novices or professional designers as well. Visme combines both capability and ease of use.

You can use Visme to build presentations that are boardroom ready and create engaging charts and infographics. You can also create short videos and animations, posts for social media, or professional documents that create a cohesive brand experience.

Visme is used by over fourteen million users. Visme understands user experience and design along with engineering-driven thinking. With a focus on simplifying and democratizing visual content for everyone, not just designers. Individuals and students can explore some of its templates and get a sense of what it has to offer. It is the choice of both small and large companies.

Important features of Visme:

• By using Visme you can create engaging presentations, documents, videos, infographics, social media graphics, branded templates, charts, graphs, etc.
• Visme is suitable for all kinds of teams including sales, marketing, non-profits, human resources, agencies and consulting, etc.
• Outstanding Data Visualization and Rich Analytics.

Pricing Details:

Visme offers a Basic plan for Free. And, three paid plans i.e. Starter, Pro and Visme for Teams. Pricing details of the paid plans are given below:

8. Photopea

Photopea is developed by programmer Ivan Kutskir of the Czech Republic, the web-based picture editor is a simpler version of Adobe Photoshop software. Photopia allows you to do pretty much all that Photoshop has to offer.

Photopea is most helpful if you aren’t a pro at using Adobe software. You need to do something that’s pretty urgent or just get your hands on more professional software. Photopea is a worthwhile place to check out. Plus, points go to allowing you to edit content in the formats of PSD, AI, PDF, or any other format.

Photopea is an advanced image editor and it can work with both raster and vector graphics which is why image editing has great experience in Photopea.

Important features of Photopea:

• Easy to understand and easy to work.
• Puppet warp tool for bending objects.
• Move tool for moving layers and their parts.
• PSD templates.

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9. Google Slides

Google Slides is a product by Google. It is a powerful presentation tool packed with many features and options for creating and presenting presentations easier than ever. You can create a simple presentation revolving around business talk. and co-edit it with others in real time without losing the previous version of it.

You have control over who can comment, view and edit your slides across PCs, Macs, mobiles, and tablets. Start the presentation from scratch or use a template. You can add videos, images, drawings, and smooth transitions making it easy to design slides.

Important features of Google Slides:

• Auto-save function to automatically save changes that you make on your presentation.
• Create master slide and add elements like headers and footers that will be common for every slide in your presentation.
• Change the look of your slides by adding a theme.
• Integrate content from external video hosting platforms.

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10. Unsplash

Being able to design also requires images or illustrations that you might need to put along with your content. This will enhance your website or the brochure that you may be making. But randomly using another person’s images or illustrations without their permission or giving them credit for them is a mistake you don’t want to be making.

So where do you get these pictures that are free to download and royalty-free? Unsplash is a marketplace for high resolution images that has over three million curated photos that you can use according to your needs freely.

Started as a Tumblr Blog, it has now become an industry-leading visual community. Unsplash has some notable collaborations with partners like BuzzFeed, Squarespace, and Trello being powered by their API making the Unsplash library more widely accessible. To get the most out of it, you can search for what you are looking for.

Important features of Unsplash:

• It has multiple device connectivity.
• Excellent download speeds.
• It allows users to search by photo and collection.

11. Freepik

Freepik site has carefully curated high-quality graphic sources which include vectors, stock images, logos, icons, photos, PSD files, and everything that you might need to work on your creative project. The categories drop-down menu gives you a wide range to choose from, ranging from backgrounds to business cards.

It’s also available as a plug-in for Figma. The newest feature of the website includes fonts that are ready to download with one click to customize your webpage or any other thing that you want.

Important features of Freepik:

• A wide range of ready-made graphics.
• High-quality stock content.
• Find newest and trendiest photos and designs.
• Access to ready-to-publish designs.

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12. Prezi

The Prezi presentation creation software allows you to make a presentation that is not boring by just moving from one static slide to the next. Prezi allows you to use motion, zoom, and spatial relationships to bring your ideas to life, making you a compelling presenter. Also included in the software are the Prezi videos and Prezi design. The software enables you to create and share your impactful visual message efficiently.

Important Features of Prezi:

• Importing PowerPoint slides.
• It has an excellent presenter-view mode.
• Embedding video option

Pricing Details:

Prezi offers a Basic plan for Free. And, three paid plans i.e. Standard, Plus and Premium. 14 days free trial also available to to explore its features and download any presentations you create, without cost. Pricing details of the paid plans are given below:

13. Piktochart

Piktochart is widely used in the business world. Piktochart is a visual storytelling tool that is created for simplicity. You can prepare a presentation, eye-catching posters, infographics, or an engaging video in less than an hour with just a few clicks. The highlight of the platform is its drag-and-drop editor.

Enabling you to stay in tune with your work, you can use Piktochart to download your design in the format of a PNG, PDF, or PPT file. Communicate clearly and effectively through visuals. It also has an extensive library of assets that come in formats like GIFs, icons, high-quality images, and more. The most exciting part? You don’t need to have experience in design to use this visual communication tool.

Important Features of Piktochart:

• It has a variety of templates collection.
• Piktochart provides outstanding remote collaboration for corporate teams.
• It has full desktop publishing capabilities.

Pricing Details:

Piktochart offers a Free plan for starters looking to improve their visual communication. And, two paid plans i.e. Pro and Enterprise to scale the creation of your visual content. Pricing details of the paid plans are given below:

14. Coolors

Ever wondered what color scheme would best suit your website? Perhaps you’ve tried several color schemes but they just don’t seem to fit your brand or do you feel something is off? And you wish you could just pick the exact same colors from a picture to find the right match that might fit, or get a ready-to-use color palette.

Coolors get the job done for you. It’s a color scheme generator for designers that works super fast. With colors, you can generate and explore color palettes, and check for contrast. Its coolest feature is being able to re-color artwork. Pick an image that inspires you. The tool will extract the colors for you.

You can also make and create a gradient palette, and explore other gradients. The newest features include a font generator, changing image colors, and an image converter.

Tools offered by Coolors:

• Contrast Checker
• Generate, create, and extract palettes
• Color Picker
• Font Generator
• Collage Creator
• Image Converter.

15. DaFont

DaFont website contains archives of fonts that are available to download for free, contributed by the community. You can download and use high-quality fonts for free for commercial use that range from sans-serif, serif, script, handwritten, calligraphy, display, & more. Browsing is available by alphabetical listing, style, author, or popularity.

Important Features of DaFont

• Huge collection of fonts, including stylish and simple fonts.
• You can find here premium fonts for free.
• App and Web are easy to use.

Conclusion

There are many different types of design tools available that are excellent resources for non-designers looking to create professional-looking designs without the need to hire a professional or invest in expensive software. Some tools may be more geared toward creating graphics, while others may be better suited for building websites. We’ve tried to include a wide range of options to suit different needs. We hope that our list of the top 15 easy-to-use DIY design tools for non-designers in 2023 has provided some helpful information and inspiration for your design projects.

FAQs

Which tools are used for designing?

Canva, Stencil, Adobe Express, PicMonkey, Gimp, Photopea, Google Slides, Figma, Unsplash, and Freepik are some of the tools used for designing.

How do you design for non-designers?

Create a color palette, use white space, and consider the psychological impact of colors.

Is there any free design app?

Yes, there are many free versions of design apps like Canva, Adobe Express, etc.

What are the common design mistakes by non-designers?

Non-designers generally make mistakes like using too many words to design, poor color selections, placing visuals arbitrarily, and mismatching fonts.

What are DIY design tools?

DIY design tools are software or online platforms that allow users to create their own designs without the need for professional design skills or experience.

Who are DIY design tools for?

DIY design tools are typically geared toward non-designers or individuals who do not have formal training in design. They are an excellent resource for anyone looking to create professional-looking designs without the need to hire a designer or invest in expensive design software.

What types of designs can I create with design tools?

You can create graphics, websites, marketing materials, and more with the help of design tools.

How easy are design tools to use?

Most of the design tools offer drag-and-drop interfaces, pre-designed templates, and step-by-step guides to help users create professional-looking designs with minimal effort and no design experience.