Best Design Resources (Free and Paid) For Marketers

While I don’t consider myself as a designer, I see design as an essential skill for marketers. No matter if you are someone who fancy writing awesome content; someone who gets busy sending newsletters to an audience, or someone who is earning as a freelancer. Marketing without Design is like coconut without water. Here's why, I love to try different tools and enhance my creativity. Here are some design resources I prefer to use as a marketer:

🖼 Creating and Editing Marketing collaterals and Images

When it comes to creating Images with scratch, I recommend you to play around with Figma and Canva. While Figma isn’t free except for the trial version, Canva still is a great tool for designing images for your blogs and websites.

I also use Gravit Designer, which is still a great alternative to tools like Adobe Illustrator and Sketch. Unlike Sketch, which doesn’t let you convert a JPG or PNG image to vector format, Gravit Designer is an excellent tool for creating prototypes and logos. You can download Gravit designer for your desktop or you can use it online.

Bonus Design tools I recommend to boost your design ambitions:

• Pablo by Buffer: I recommend Pablo to quickly create Images for Social media such as Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
• Duotone: If you fancy creating images with exciting backgrounds, you can use Duotone which lets you upload an image and add different effects to it.
• Remove.bg: If you want to remove the background of human-centered Images, remove.bg is an excellent resource. It won’t work in removing the background of every other Image though.
• Squoosh: Squoosh will help you to compress your images without compromising the quality.

👻 Icons and Illustrations

One skill that I currently lack is drawing illustrations and icons. Ergo, I recommend you to use Icons and illustrations from these awesome free design resources:

• Emojicopy: I love to use emoji’s in the blog, for they are helpful in conveying my emotions to the reader. This free tool will make sure you mention emoji’s in blog without any hassle.
• Iconsdb: A clean and intuitive icon sets which I use in almost every design project. Icons here are free and easy to use with almost every size. What’s more, you also get the color customization option that other design resources lack with this tool.
• unDraw: An opensource collection of colorful illustrations that are fun to have in your design.
• Humaans: I rarely use this, but I find it amazing resource to mix-match with different scenes and characters. You can use it in your ebooks, infographics, social media graphics, etc.
• Freepik: This resource need no special mention. I think most of you might be aware of Freepik website that lets you use free of cost graphics and illustrations in your projects.
• Creazilla: Oh boy, I would recommend you Creazilla over Freepik anyday. Not only does it contains free illustrations but also free silhouttes and cliparts.

Summing up

While I don’t know much about designing, I really enjoy designing pleasant and colorful designs. For starters, I recommend you read these UX tips from Steve Schoger that will make sure you prepare clean and intuitive designs.

Remember, it takes a lot of time to understand the basics of designing. The resources mentioned above will help marketers to prepare awesome graphics and design collaterals. Designers, however, should learn how to design sketches or images from scratch. After all, there’s more to design than copying something already available on the web. I hope that the resources I shared in this article help you in any way.

Which design tool or resource you use? Let me know in the comments.