Whether you’re an amateur or a pro designer, your tools matter. While it all boils down to your skills, using suitable design software is important for all graphic designers. The best graphic design software comes with the perfect tools to aid you in making stunning works.
Nowadays, graphic design enjoys growing importance. In a digital world, people are switching to more visual-based media. It is needed for blogs, product promotion on e-commerce, social media, and many other platforms. Here are several tools that can help you create the best designs.
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop is a household name in the world of graphic design for a reason. There are many things you can do with Photoshop. You can do photo editing, graphic and web design, motion, and digital painting. It is also one of the most widely used 3D design software.
Photoshop comes with a sleek interface and a lot of tools to improve your editing efficiency. It’s also synchronized with Adobe Creative Cloud, allowing you to manage your library. However, you need to pay a monthly subscription for its license.
Adobe InDesign
InDesign is a relatively easy graphic design software to use for beginners. This is a necessary software, especially if you work in media or publishing. It boasts various layouts for designing magazines, infographics, brochures, and other publicity materials.
Other than printed designs, InDesign also allows you to export your work as HTML which is tremendously useful for web designers. However, like Photoshop, it comes with a rather pricey subscription rate.
Adobe Illustrator
This is one of the more suitable graphic design software for beginners despite its expansive features. Illustrator is a must-have tool for any kind of design from web layout to product designs. But it’s particularly used to create vector images.
Illustrator comes with a highly customizable interface that allows you to edit more than one artboard at the same time. Then, you can save your graphics in vector format. With vector files, you can print them in any size without any reduction in quality.
It takes some time to learn how to use all of Illustrator’s features, but the versatility of this software is excellent for any kind of design. Not only that, it’s available on all operating systems (OS). The cons, though? Adobe Illustrator takes up a lot of memory in your computer, and it’s quite expensive.
CorelDraw Graphics Suite
Other than Adobe, this is one of the best graphic design software. CorelDraw Graphics Suite doesn’t only have powerful tools, but it also allows you to access Content Exchange, an online library where you can find templates, fonts, high-resolution images, vectors, and other free design resources.
CorelDraw offers various payment schemes with a 15-day free trial period. However, the benefits you get from it are worth the price. You’ll find CorelDraw’s customizable UI extremely helpful to boost your productivity.
Photoscape
There is not much free graphic design software like Photoscape. This software offers an image editor functionality packed in a straightforward interface. It’s suited for many computers, being lightweight and available for both Windows and Mac OS.
Although this software is free, Photoscape’s features are user-friendly and good enough if you want to experiment around and learn image editing. While it doesn’t have the sophisticated design capacity of Photoshop, Photoscape is one of the most suitable software for those who’ve just started designing.
Xara Designer Pro X
Xara is a platform tailored specifically for the more advanced designers. Its complex tools and features allow for web and print design solutions. Part of it is because of its speed: it’s one of the fastest in vector rendering, making it highly suitable for sophisticated and large-scale designs.
However, a downside to Xara is that it’s only available on Windows. So, if you’re looking for graphic design software for Mac, it’s not for you. Additionally, being catered to pro designers, its features have a steep learning curve, and its yearly subscription rate is rather costly.
GIMP
GNU Image Manipulation Program or GIMP for short is another graphic design software free download that you should try. This open-source platform is equipped with Photoshop-like features at no charge. And it’s also constantly updated to keep up with the newest development in design.
GIMP has an interface that you can easily customize according to your needs. If you know a little bit of coding, you can tweak it a little bit more. Though it’s only available for Windows users, it remains one of the best graphic design software available for free through user interface design firm.