The Six Best Free Design Tools for Entrepreneurs
Being an entrepreneur is no easy task, it takes serious effort, investment, and time. Keeping your overheads as minimal as possible is an important part of running the business, at least at the start of its life. There are, thankfully, a whole host of free design tools out there that you can use to kickstart your entrepreneurial journey.
Benefits of Using Free Design Tools
First of all, there’s the obvious reason that they’re free. There aren’t many people out there that don’t like free tools! The following tools are great for starting a business and the majority of them allow you to upgrade to unlock further features and tools. They’re essentially offering you a free trial with no time limit.
Using these free tools offers the major benefit that everyone in your team is able to use them, be perfectly aligned on production, and you don’t have to worry about purchasing extra seats if a new team member joins.
The beauty of the majority of these tools is that they’re all online-based, meaning that you can access them from any internet-enabled device, from anywhere, at any point. That’s a whole lot more convenient that having to download software onto a specific device.
6 Best Free Design Tools For Entrepreneurs 2022
Canva
Canva has rapidly become one of the world’s leading design tools for the entrepreneur market. Its easy-to-use accessible software makes it incredibly simple to create stunning artwork in seconds. If you’re not a graphic designer, Canva has everything you need to create branding for your business from business cards to videos, and infographics to logos. There are literally thousands of templates, all of which you’re able to use for your business.
The free version is extensive and has the majority of tools that the typical user will want to use. Upgrade to premium if you want access to a huge library of images, videos, and premium graphics, plus additional features such as background removers and animations. There’s also a handy mock-up tool, however it doesn’t work fantastically and sometimes stretches images, so you might want to consider Pixelied’s iPhone mockups tool as an alternative.
Wireframe.cc
Within Wireframe.cc, you can create mock-ups of websites and apps easily within their online software and then share them with the team that will create them. It’s a great choice for when you want to retain some creative input without creating a website or app yourself.
WhatTheFont – MyFonts
Creating your brand takes time and effort, and a great deal of that time can be hunting around the internet for inspiration and similar effects or fonts that you’ve seen before. WhatTheFont takes some of the guesswork out of inspiration by helping you identify fonts and showing you where you can download them.
Simply take a screenshot of some text from a website, upload it to WhatTheFont, and within a few seconds, it will have either identified the font precisely or will offer you the closest alternatives that it can find.
Coolors
Another great branding tool, but rather than focusing on fonts this one focuses on brand colours. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be used for branding, simply anything that requires a palette of colours.
Head to Coolors and load up their home screen, you’ll be presented with 5 random colours. If this is your first time using the site, start hammering the spacebar and you’ll see the colours change. Coolors aims to show you colours that complement each other and work well alongside each other.
If you already have some colours locked in, simply type in the # code and then hit the padlock to lock that colour in. You can also find shades of colours, check the contrast levels, favourite colours, and change the order.
It’s an incredible free tool, especially when combined with the export options so you can share your created palettes with your team.
Unsplash
Finding stock photos for your website, content, or social media is a bit of an onerous task, especially if you can’t find them affordably or without complicated royalty issues. This is where Unsplash makes life easy.
Unsplash is a huge library of free images taken by photographers (not necessarily professionals) from all around the world. The search engine lets you explore anything that you like, but relies on the photographer uploading using keywords in order to be found. Each image is free to download in a variety of images, they just ask that you name-drop the photographer or link to their portfolio (no obligation).
Eye Dropper – Chrome Extension
Finding out the codes of colours can be complicated if you don’t have extensive knowledge of pantones. Realistically, that’s a small segment of society. To make life easier, download the chrome extension Eye Dropper. When launched it turns your cursor into an eyedropper tool that allows you to pick any colour on any website, it’ll then tell you the specific hex code and RGB of that colour.
Key Takeaways
These free tools give you a superb base to build on, they’re certainly worth investigating before you dive into paying for more expensive paid tools. At least when you’re launching your business journey these tools will help you keep overheads considerably lower.
- There’s no harm in trying these tools, and you’ll find they do almost everything similar paid tools will do.
- Ensure you’re happy with the tool before upgrading to a paid version.