Creating high quality and streamline content can be hard for anyone, whether you’re a graphic designer, student, teacher, crafter or blogger. And once you have found great tools for your project, it can usually come with a hefty price tag. So in this post I am going to tell you all about my 5 top tools that are completely free – yes you read that right, they won’t cost you a penny! Since I began blogging myself, I have found it really hard to find the perfect tools that suit the design and aesthetic of my site, so I have spent hours trawling the internet to find the best tools so that you don’t have to! So without further ado, let’s get into them!
Font Squirrel for all your fonts
It’s so hard to find the perfect font for different projects, so rather than scouring the internet for high quality, free fonts, Font Squirrel will do all the work for you! The fonts are completely legal and you can take your pick from thousands of options. Once you’ve picked your favourite font, you can download it with CSS (it’s a lot easier than it sounds, trust me if I can figure out how to do that anyone can!) You can pick from bold fonts, stencil fonts, calligraphic fonts, grunge fonts, elegant fonts and many more to suit your project.Canva for creating your images
Canva for creating your images
Canva is a free graphic design platform that allows their users to create anything from social media graphics, posters, presentations, logos, business cards and media kits. I use Canva to create my Instagram posts, my Pinterest graphics and even promotion materials. They also have a huge collection of professional templates for a wide variety of content and a drag-and-drop function, so you can pick the perfect design for your project and alter it how you want to.
Monogram Maker for creating monograms
A monogram is a motif, usually a person or company’s initials, which is used as a recognisable symbol or logo. Examples of monograms are the Louis Vuitton logo, the Chanel logo, the HP logo and the Warner Brothers logo.
The Monogram maker allows you to design a monogram to create your own recognisable logo or symbol, and you can then download the file or print it. You can choose different designs, and click directly in the design to change the text. However, please note that you must have the pop-up blocker on your device turned off in order to download the monogram.
PhotoScape for adding some flair to your images and graphics
PhotoScape is a simple but effective and powerful image editing tool, and it has some amazing overlay, effects and graphic design features built in. If you’ve never heard of it before, there’s a free version and premium version. However, the free version is already jam packed with awesome options for adding some serious professionalism to your graphics and images.
It’s available for both Mac OS and Windows OS, so you can really start to step up your graphic design. With the free version, you can have access to full image editing tools, including resize, crop, HDR and Dehaze, add image effects, transformations, adjust colours and add frames including many more features.
StockSnap for finding high quality stock images
Known for its high-quality free stock imagery, StockSnap has a whole host of different categories you can browse through. You’ll never struggle to find what you’re looking for, and the images are free from any copyright restrictions. I have used a few of their stock photos on my own blog, and they suit the style I’m going for and the aesthetic of my site. I always look for girly stock photos, with tones of pinks and whatever fits the topic of my blog post.
If you are creating a scrapbook, wedding invitation or birthday cards, you will be able to find the perfect images for your projects, although be warned you might spend hours looking through their amazing images as there are so many to go through!
So there we have it, my top 5 free tools for your next big work project. We have summed up how to find fonts, create free graphics and images, making monograms, editing and adding effects to your images, and finding high quality stock images. Please let me know in the comments if you enjoyed this post and your thoughts on the sites I have picked and what your favourite graphic design tools are.
