5 Awesome Tools for Creating Original Visual Content

Did you know that content with relevant images gets 94 percent more views than content without?

You don’t need award-winning design skills, or even access to Photoshop, in order to create attention-grabbing visuals for your website and social media posts. You just need to know where to look. Here is a roundup of our top five free online design resources, plus bonus information on infographics, stock images, and fonts:

1. Canva

Canva makes it super easy to create all sorts of designs from scratch, including social media ads, presentations, posters, photo collages, and more. You can choose from a number of pre-made templates or design your own from scratch. A helpful feature is the drag-and-drop interface for adding different elements to create your masterpiece.

2. Place It

Forget trying to compose the perfect shot of someone holding an iPhone displaying an image of your website or products. With Place It, you can easily create striking visuals for promotional content of new tools and services. You can add your product’s screenshots right into professional-looking stock photos and even interactive backgrounds.

Here’s what the Tummel.Me blog would look like when added to a Place It graphic:

3. PowerPoint Templates

If you don’t have the budget or the time to work with Photoshop, don’t forget that PowerPoint has some useful templates that make it easy to create professional-looking graphics, including SlideShares, social media images, and infographics. Tip: when you’re done creating your graphic, don’t forget to save your file as an image.

4. PicMonkey

PicMonkey is an amazing desktop app with a huge range of tools, from touching up photos to making photo and image collages to designing Facebook cover photos, banners, featured posts, and avatars. Plus, it’s free!

You can pay a small fee to get even more effects and fonts, ads-free editing, and some cool premium layout designs. So, if you need to edit photos or create visuals to promote events, products, etc., this tool is worth checking out.

5. GraphicBurger

GraphicBurger comes highly recommended by Debbie, Tummel.Me’s designer extraordinaire. It offers free premium quality design resources like mock-ups, icons, backgrounds, and text effects. Also included are exclusive PSD files created in-house, plus featured top-notch freebies from creatives around the world. This is a great resource if you have some design knowledge, and preferably access to Photoshop.

Question: How do I make an infographic?

An infographic is an effective and eye-catching way to summarize information, but if you’re not a designer, creating one can be a daunting task. Infogr.am’s free web app makes the process fairly easy, and even fun. Their interactive and user-friendly layouts allow you to embed charts, videos, photos, maps, and more. PowerPoint also has an infographic template.

Question: Where can I find quality stock images?

There is a huge number of free stock photo sites available, but who has the time to wade through them all to find the best ones? We did the work for you. These are our favorite sites for cost-free, copyright-free, searchable images:

• pixabay
• photopin
• unsplash

Question: Where do I go to find cool fonts?

Ready to move on from Arial? Debbie, our designer, recommends dafont.com and losttype.