6 DIY Design Tools for Non-Designers
As someone who loves
design but who has admittedly little artistic ability, I’m always looking for new design tools that let me
create beautiful visuals without needing to ask for help.
To save you some of the
work, I’m sharing some
of my favorite DIY tools for creating custom-made logos, Instagram posts,
infographics, and more.
1. Tailor Brands – for Logo Design
Tailor Brands is a quick and easy tool for designing beautiful, professional, quality logos. The tool is great if you’re creating a business website or blog or spicing up a social media page.
Tailor Brands uses
algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to generate logo
designs that take into account your industry niche, products, and audience.
While the design tool asks the user to make a few choices, it finishes the logo
process in minutes and requires very little effort overall.
The AI design platform
first asks the user to type in their company name and industry. After supplying
a brief description of their business, users are asked to choose their
preferred logo format and font types. I like that the logo generator supplies
several logo options so that you can choose the one that resonates with you
most.
2. Stencil – for Social Media Posts
I love using Stencil because it consistently boosts engagement
on my social media posts. The design tool has a supply of 1.4 million
background photos and over 650 design templates, which means I’m bound to find something I like.
The program comes with image-editing capabilities that make each image customizable. According to a Kissmetrics survey, these image-editing capabilities have helped businesses earn 84% more clicks.
The tool also lets you
specify which social media platform you’d like to post on, and then resizes your design accordingly.
You can schedule posts ahead of time, too, to create a full social media
posting schedule.
While the Pro version
costs $9 per month, the free version is fairly generous. The free version lets
you create ten images per month, with limited options for icons and background.
3. Crello – for Animation
Crello is a helpful and easy-to-use design tool
for web graphics of all kinds, but I particularly like using it for animation.
They have a huge image library of genuinely high-quality photos, with additional access to the photo library of stock photo giant Depositphotos. On top of that, the tool offers over 4,000 animated templates and over 2,000 animated objects, letting you create eye-catching graphics that move and sparkle.
I typically use Crello
for animated social media posts, paid ads, and Instagram Stories, but it’s also a helpful tool for printed posters
and flyers. After you choose a template, you can either start designing from
scratch or use typefaces pre-selected by Crello’s design team. The templates are highly customizable,
with lots of options for backgrounds, stickers, borders, icons, and fonts.
4. Piktochart – for Infographics
Piktochart is a helpful DIY design tool to create custom infographics for your blog posts, social media pages, and more. The drag-and-drop interface is simple and intuitive, with a very easy learning curve, and requires no prior design experience.
You start by picking
from Piktochart’s library of
over 600 templates. Once you’ve chosen a
template, you can select from a wide array of images, interactive charts,
animated icons, and videos. The platform is also easy to edit, and lets you
change the color, font, or format of any design.
To enrich your
infographic with hard data, the design tool lets you import an Excel file with
data on it that you can then add to your presentation.
5. Snappa – for Custom Images
When it comes to customizing images, Snappa is another easy-to-use tool. The benefit of Snappa is that it makes it simple and straightforward to choose the appropriate image dimensions for your platform. The tool has preset image dimensions for social media, blogs, emails, display ads, and infographics.
Like many of the other
tools in this list, it also offers a wide selection of professionally designed
templates. The stock photo library is impressive and doesn’t look as cheesy as most of the stock photo libraries
available online. You have the option to further customize these templates by
adding graphics, texts, and various effects to your photos.
6. Over – for Mobile Design
I’ve included Over
on this list because unlike the other options, it’s a mobile app. Over lets you do DIY design from your
phone and on the go. This is particularly useful for Instagram and other
mobile-first platforms.
Over also takes into account the importance of different image sizes, and it offers 27 preset image sizes that suit different platforms and needs.
The mobile design tool
provides custom-made fonts and beautiful artwork overlays that allow you to
customize your own images. It even features a clever color picker tool that you
can use to match your text to an existing color in the image. The app gives
mobile creatives a high degree of freedom to tweak and customize images and
text.
Summary
I’m amazed by the number of DIY design tools available,
and you can’t go wrong
with any of these options. Whether you to create a custom image with animated
icons or text overlay, an engaging social media post, or a logo for your small
business or blog, these tools help designers and non-designers alike create
beautiful visuals in minutes.