7 Essential Design Tools & Resources For Your Brand
Whether you are starting a blog, online business, or offering design services, there are great tools and resources you can use to get started. Here are my favorite design tools that I use for my shops, blog, and freelance work.
Creative Market - Creative Market is my favorite place to purchase design resources. Sellers on CM offer a variety of digital products including vector templates, illustrations, social media templates, lightroom presets, fonts, and more. One of my favorite products to get started with branding is the Ladypreneur Branding Kit by Station Seven.
Canva - is an online design tool, that makes creating design for for social media, print, or any other purpose super easy. On canva you can create your graphics from scratch or use premade templates by Canva and other users.
Freepik - Freepik is one of my favorite online photo and vector resources. This website offers a wide variety of design resources for free with attribution. And if you want to use their resources without attribution, you can purchase their super affordable subscription.
Affinity Designer - Adobe illustrator is the industry standard for vector design, but Affinity Designer is my recommendation especially if your a beginner at vector work. While not as complex as Illustrator, it has most of the major features needed to get most vector needs done, especially if you’re a blogger or online entrepreneur. I’ve used Adobe Illustrator a lot over the years, but I prefer using Affinity Designer almost all the time. While I recommend learning Adobe Illustrator at some point, Affinity Designer is a great place to start when working in vector and may be all that you need depending on your focus. Another great thing, is that there is no subscription, just a one time purchase of $49.99 (keep on the look out for sales!). And its availabe for Windows, Mac, and iPad.
Adobe Acrobat - Adobe Acrobat is an essential tool for creating, editing, and even signing PDFs. You can also create fillable PDFs and interactive PDFs with Adobe Acrobat.
Adobe Lightroom - Adobe Lightroom is a popular tool for photo editing, organizing, archiving, and publishing. Lightroom allows users to make basic and advanced edits to their photos with their robust slider system along with brushes, gradients, and presets. Lightroom presets and profiles work similar to filters you would find on Instagram and VSCO, and allow you to add premade looks to your photos. You can create your own presets or purchase them from shops like mine, Filtercrave. Here is one of my popular preset collections, Bright White Collection.
Adobe Photoshop - Photoshop is the most popular industry standard for photo editing, retouching, digital painting, and graphic design. It is an incredibly complex software that can accomplish a wide variety of basic and advanced things including animation. This powerful software can be a little intimidating to learn, but is well worth it.