If you just started your own business and can’t spend a lot of money on your logo or can’t afford to hire a graphic designer yet, here you have the most essential graphic design resources, tools and tricks to kickstart and create a professional brand with a very low cost. Just make sure you know all about choosing the right images for your site so you can create the most organic user experience possible.
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Withoomph, instant logo generator.
Ideal for freelancers and startups. This is the simplest and fastest logo generator you will ever use. Withoomph offers affordable beautiful designed logos created instantly online.
Simply enter the name of your company, the most relevant keywords that define your business and your color palette. Whatever your business is, Withoomph will find a provisional branding solution for you.
#BONUS How to stand out with your logo design
Graftene, a digital marketing agency from UK, has put together a few tips on how to make your logo stand out from your competitors. Click the link and check it out!
Google Fonts, find beautiful, fast, and free typographies.
A professional premium font can give your site a high-end look, but it will also take a huge part from your design budget. The budget becomes even bigger if you are willing to use the font family not just for web design, but for use on mobile devices and print. A crazy fact, even some font licences are priced depending to the amount of website traffic you receive.
Google Fonts, however, is a library of free licensed fonts. With Google Fonts you won’t have any problem with licensing and rights because Google Fonts are free for commercial use. These fonts are very easy to download and used in print or install on your website (so no trouble with font embedding). In addition, since you will not have to upload the fonts to your server, you will not experience any strain from the fonts.
Flaticon, use unlimited vector icons to kick ass your brand.
What are vector graphics and why should you care? Unlike JPEGs, GIFs, and BMP images, vector graphics are not made up of a grid of pixels. Instead, vector graphics are comprised of paths, which are defined by a start and end point, along with other points, curves, and angles along the way. So, essentially, because vector images are not made up of ‘dots’, you can use it for larger size designs (mainly for printing purposes: magazine, billboards, banners, etc.) without losing any image quality. In addition, vector images like SVG files are great for web design purposes as well , as they carry a low file-size compared to PNG and JPEG files.
Now that we know what is a vector file, you can understand why Flaticon is that important. Flaticon is the largest database of free icons available in SVG, EPS, PNG, PSD and BASE 64 formats. With almost a million vector icons grouped in many different packs, Flaticon is the largest search engine of free icons in the world. How amazing is that? Now you can provide great content as well as a great design for your users.
Do you need help with your brand?
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#BONUS Vector.
Vectr, free Vector Graphics Software. Vectr is used to create vector graphics from scratch. It’s very easy and intuitive to use, simply upload the files you desire to convert into vector format, and you are ready to kick ass your brand!
Unsplash, get free stock photos for commercial purpose.
Labelled with reuse and modification, Unsplash is the world’s most generous community of photographers. If you’re looking for the right images for your brand or website, Unsplash brings you a huge variety of excellent 100% free stock images. You only just have to type the right keywords in the search bar and Unsplash will display an amazing an (and freshly updated) list of photo resources you can use for your website or brand. You are welcome! 🙂
Canva, create amazing designs to boost your social media audience.
There are many great uses you can give to Canva, but I believe more than anything this is a very powerful platform for social media. Canva allows you to use pre-defined social media sizes, which is a huge timesaver. You can also upload your own logos and stock images to use within your own Canva designs. Furthermore, Canva lets you use an extensive number of templates, which is a great tool for non graphic designers, giving you the opportunity to look like one.
AppLaunchPad, the mockup generator to make your presentations look professional.
If you are constantly creating presentations for your prospects or clients, AppLaunchPad allows you to create high resolution mockups for free. You can choose from more than 1000 free templates, covering all different types of devices (laptops, mobile phones, tablets, wearables, etc.). AppLaunchPad even allows you to add text, colors, images and graphics to your mockups, and even choose select a transparent background to make your mockup more attractive.
#BONUS Zippypixels.
Zippypixels. This is actually something you may find useful to subscribe to for your web stuff, and even maybe digital marketing for your business. I get emails once a week with free PSD mockups to download for many different things. Lots of poster mockups, T-shirts, magazines, brochures, devices and more amazing resources. You might not use all of them, but I’m sure it will give you new design ideas as well.
TemplateShock, hundreds of printing templates for companies and professionals.
TemplateShock is a site that contains more than 900 design templates of all kinds aimed at companies, professionals and graphic design enthusiasts, with the mission of making your life and work a little easier and faster.
Among the categories of templates found, they have: logos, posters, flyers, business cards, invoices, quotes, tri-folds, menus, letters and much more.
Wisestamp, free email signature generator.
Wisestamp allows to take advantage of a vast variety of email signature templates to fit any type of business. However, I would not recommend using its Chrome Extension, as I doesn’t really offer any advantage but adding a branded link at the bottom of your email signature. My trick is to simply copy your final design and paste it under you email settings > signature box.
BONUS #1 Email Signature Template.
If you manage HTML, you can download my html email signature template and modify it as you wish. Coding a pure html template is going to give you always more flexibility to get exactly what you are looking for.
BONUS #2 20 Ways To Improve Your Graphic Design.
Visit this link to find out 20 ways to improve graphic design for your business. 🙂
Are you looking for Graphic Design job opportunities in Canada? Find our more at Jobble
