Top 10 Graphic Design Tools and Software for Marketers

These days, there are dozens of design and content marketing tools, which makes it difficult to find the one that suits your business needs. The right choice can help you grow your business and the wrong one will make things harder. Researching and experimenting with so many tools can be a long and time-consuming process. That’s why we’ve rounded up some of the best design tools for marketers that can make your life much easier.

Here’s a list of 10 software tools and services for graphic design that every marketer should consider using in 2022.

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a program for working with vector graphics. It’s widely used by designers all over the world. Art students who have mastered this app can make a profit selling their vectors, and modeling agencies actively use Illustrator as it’s able to connect to specialized apps and facilitate clothing design.

The tool can be useful even if your specialty is far from design. After all, with Adobe Illustrator, you can create effective visual material to promote your business online. Don’t have any drawing skills? Rest assured: this is not a problem when it comes to vector graphics.

The images here consist of disparate objects: lines and shapes filled with solid colors or patterns. With Adobe Illustrator, you can easily work with simple graphic objects, but its possibilities are far from limited to that.

Here’s what you can create with Adobe Illustrator:

• Infographics, icons, or logos;
• Drawings, diagrams, or charts;
• Illustrations;
• Print products (flyers, brochures, posters, postcards, etc.).

Figma

Figma is a convenient tool for prototyping a letter layout in a team. You can comment on the layout and make edits to it.

Figma is the main tool of many web designers and can be quite useful for marketers as well. If your work is at least partly connected with a website and its improvement, or if your company has an app that must be periodically updated, you should have at least a general idea of how to use Figma.

Here are a few tasks Figma can help you with:

• Sketch an attractive layout without the help of a professional designer;
• Represent your ideas beautifully to others (colleagues, clients, management, etc.);
• Quickly explain things, e.g. build a page or email layout;
• Make a TOR (Terms of Reference) for a designer to create a clean design;
• Build a mockup of a landing page that the whole team can work with.

What’s Cool About Figma?

• Multi-platform: You can use Figma on your PC, smartphone, or any other device. The coolest thing is that even if you don’t have a Figma account, you can still view the design. However, you won’t be able to leave comments or make any changes.
• Teamwork: Figma is similar to Google Docs and other similar online services. You can work on any project together with other participants, easily share your projects via links, grant access to edit/view, etc. This can be useful when you send your design for approval and you don’t want anyone to mess anything up by accident.
• Minimalistic interface: You can quickly get to grips with the basic functions by watching 2-3 video tutorials.
• Free plan: You can use Figma for free. You have access to all the features and tools, but you can only give editing rights to one more person.
• Interactive prototypes: Figma allows you to combine sets of website or app screens so that, when you click on a button, a form or another window opens.
• Components: This is analogous to the smart objects in PhotoShop. Components allow designers to quickly make changes to identical interface elements. For example, you can change section names or button colors in the menus on each page.

You can manage three projects for free and professional rates start at $12/month per editor.

Crello and Canva

Over the past few years, visual marketing has become a very important strategy for attracting visitors to your site. So, for a business marketing strategy to be effective, it’s critical to integrate visual marketing.

That’s where Crello and Canva are great. They are drag-and-drop tools that provide a huge library of pre-made templates.

Crello developers say that “everyone can be a designer” — that’s the motto of the online graphic editor, actually. This also fits Canva. These two graphic design tools are together on our list for a reason — with their help, you can easily create spectacular promotional materials without being a design professional. They allow you to create impressive, professional-looking banners, graphics for social networks, presentations, layouts for printed materials, and many other kinds of visual content.

You can edit pre-made templates or create content from scratch using your own images, fonts, animations, and other design objects. Each of the editors has a simple and straightforward interface that you can figure out in a matter of minutes.

Canva helps you easily create high-quality images using customizable photo filters, or by manipulating text and stock photos for your website or social media profile. It’s the perfect tool for people who don’t want to use more complicated design tools like Photoshop or InDesign.

The free version of these services will be enough to create eye-catching graphics without the knowledge of Photoshop and an in-house designer. The Pro plan costs $9.99/month.

Facebook’s Creative Shop

What kind of photo would look spectacular in an ad? Or maybe you should use video? How do you grab your audience’s attention in 15 seconds with a post? Check out the Facebook Creative Center for ideas. This is where Facebook Creative Shop experts have collected many examples of creative ads in various formats.

Besides a huge library of attractive ads, you will also find effective recommendations on ad creation. You will gain insights on what to show in the first seconds, how to use sounds correctly, and learn the peculiarities of mobile ads. Facebook offers creative ideas realization, where you can create advertising models, collaborate on them with your colleagues, test, and launch them easily.

Google Data Studio

The task of any marketer is to work with data, and Google Data Studio will help you visualize the results in beautiful, informative, and understandable reports. The service allows you to import data from a variety of systems that marketers use in their work, including:

• Google Ads;
• Google Analytics;
• BigQuery;
• Attribution 360;
• Adwords API;
• Google Sheets;
• YouTube Analytics, etc.

This tool comes in handy for end-to-end analytics, tracking KPIs and the effectiveness of marketing channels, managing projects, and advertising campaigns. Google Data Studio functionality allows you to generate reports based on data from multiple sources on a single dashboard. Generated reports will be updated in real-time, plus, you can choose any time to view statistics and apply flexible filtering settings to view the indicators.

Histogram, table, dynamic rows, a geographic map, different types of charts, and other visual elements are available to demonstrate the results of your advertising campaigns. You can change the graph type even after the report has been created, without having to start from scratch to find the best option.

Like many Google services, Data Studio allows you to share the reports you create with other users. This is a great solution if you want to give your colleagues access to collaborate or send up-to-date reports to your clients.

Weblium

We already know that you can create beautiful graphics for your business without being a professional designer. But what about creating a portfolio or a website with no special web design or programming skills? Weblium’s online website builder will make it possible.

Weblium may not be suitable for building fully-fledged websites with complex functionality, however, it’s great for creating business cards, blogs, landing pages, portfolios, and even small online stores. Working with Weblium, you will find many templates for different niches that you can customize for your needs. You can also use it to create web pages from scratch.

A paid subscription expands the possibilities of the service, and you can integrate contact forms, use analytics to track actions on your site, join your own domain, and open the website for indexing. However, if you need to find solutions for non-budget marketing tasks, test an offer, or a business idea via a landing page, Weblium can be your perfect assistant.

YouTube Video Builder

Google stands by its position that video is an integral part of its media strategy and an important channel for staying in touch with customers. However, not every company has the resources and budget for fully-fledged video production. YouTube Video Builder is designed to help advertisers create videos on the platform.

This simple video builder is designed for the quick editing of short (from 6- to 15-second) videos and equipped with basic tools for that. You can animate static images, overlay text, make effective transitions between slides, add music and sound effects from the library, and more. As with most DIY builders, you can choose from a variety of templates. The interface here is easy to understand and includes no superfluous settings.

After saving your video clip, you can immediately post it on your YouTube channel. Despite the fact that the builder is currently working in beta mode, its functions are enough for the quick and easy creation of video clips. Therefore, this tool will be very relevant for companies that have limited resources for video production.

DesignWizard

DesignWizard is an easy-to-use graphic design tool that allows you to create and share brilliant visual content in seconds. Thousands of new images and templates (10,000+) are added every week, plus you can upload and store your own images, brand colors, and logos for free.

DesignWizard offers instant access to over 1 million images and templates for your business, including templates for social media posts and headers, business cards, and flyers. This free graphic design tool is perfect for beginners.

The Pro plan costs $10/month and includes 60 image downloads per month, image and font uploads, free previews, and 1GB of storage.

Dynamic Dummy Image Generator

This free filler image generator offers many options, including width and height, ratio, background/foreground colors, as well as our favorite general screen and ad sizes.

You can use Dynamic Dummy for banner prototyping, insert a “gray rectangle” for clarity and add text.

Visme

With so much content going live every single day, content marketers are in a constant battle for attention. Among the most powerful attention grabbers of today are infographics. When made properly, these visual assets can combine effective data presentation with compelling storytelling, which helps businesses generate more buzz around themselves.

To create visually appealing infographics, there’s no need to acquire design skills or hire a freelancer. With Visme’s infographic maker, you can do the job yourself quickly, without compromising on the quality and creativity. The whole process comes down to a few easy steps – choose a pre-designed template, mix and match its content blocks, and customize the whole look to your brand style.

The software gives access to hundreds of pre-designed templates for any infographic type – statistical, hierarchical, comparison, timeline, informational, and many others. To make it feel more dynamic, you can add animated elements like icons, characters and gestures. If you need more of an advanced version of infographics, you can also embed audios, videos, forms, docs, and even maps from Google or Bing.

Visme is a great tool for teamwork, allowing you to collaborate on infographics with your colleagues in real time. Thanks to the option to set user permissions, it’s up to you to decide which members of your team will get access to viewing, editing, and sharing your infographics.

Design Tips for Marketers

We recommend introducing “20 minutes of design” into your daily practice, and you can find convenient online services for this below.

Behance is a leading portfolio platform for graphic designers, photographers, artists, videographers, 3D experts, and UI designers. Curators post the best projects on the main page, so you only need to spend 15 minutes a day to be in the know. It’s really cool to be able to categorize projects into themed boards, e.g. fonts, illustrations, sci-fi, and then use them as references in your work.

Design blogs like Creative Boom, It’s Nice That, AIGA Eye On Design, and designboom are the most popular design sources with relevant content. A typical difference from portfolio platforms is that article authors analyze projects in more detail and focus on the material in terms of its value to the community.

Podcasts, lectures, and public talks about graphic design are probably the best way to get absorbed in the topic without “falling asleep at your desk”, so make sure you listen to and attend as many as possible.

In our projects, we try to look into “tomorrow” and predict or build the user experience. Design is closely related to technology, art, consumer culture, ecology, and politics. In this context, we should look at related fields through design.

Take these tips on board, use the tools we’ve mentioned, and you’ll be enhancing your content with fantastic designs in no time at all. And, if you would like any more help with creating marketing materials to promote your products or services, make sure you check out Loganix’s content marketing, SEO, and PPC services.