A few months ago, we told you about a series of free online image editing tools. In practice, these are simple alternatives to Adobe Photoshop that are often used for common actions such as cropping an image, placing a frame or adding brightness to a photograph. However, all these tools, including GIMP and Sumo Paint, require a series of advanced skills and techniques to create complex graphics. Well, the Internet also has programs that allow us to create such graphics for more professional compositions. They also work online. And they’re also free. Here are three very interesting options:
Canva
This tool was created in 2012 and available in multiple languages. Canva is an online graphic design program that boasts “incredible simplicity”. In fact, the only “barrier” that Canva is that it requires us to have its services is a previous registration, which we can do with our Google account or Facebook.
Canva stands out because it works entirely from the browser, so it does not require additional installations. It also has a wide selection of templates with which you can create your own graphic elements: greeting cards, images for social networks, banners for web, flyers, magazine covers or even infographics. And you don’t have to be trained in design, or be an advanced Photoshop user because, as we said, Canva is insultingly simple.
The tool, used by more than 10 million users worldwide, has an application for iOS devices that is also free and is also characterized by its ease of use. Canva offers the user royalty-free content such as photographs, illustrations, filters, text fonts or templates that can be combined with the graphic elements that you upload from your PC.
Desygner
Following the line of the two previous programs, Desygner is a multi-device online graphic editor: it shines in its desktop version, but also works for mobile or tablet. It is even great for creating custom printed magnets.
Desygner doesn’t have as many templates as Canva, although most users will find what they need, as it offers all kinds of designs for social network graphics, headers, banners, blogs, presentations, invitations or marketing themes. It allows importing images from Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox or Google Drive and offers the user a selection of vectors, stickers or free backgrounds.
Desygner requires registration and has an extended paid version with more features and access to new templates.
Pagemodo Cover Photo
This tool is good enough to create cover images and even to take ideas from it.
The only downside I see is that its free version, when we have to put the cover image on Facebook, adds a small flag that says “Pagemodo” which can be removed by subscribing to the Premium version. Something that would not be a bad idea.
Pablo
Pablo is another great design tool. This online design tool was developed by Buffer’s people and I must admit that I didn’t use it much, but little by little I’m doing it.
What we can do with this online design tool is create those famous images with famous phrases or quotes. Once the image is created it can be published on Twitter, Facebook or through Buffer.
It’s simple, but to create certain messages, quite useful, simple and fast.
Social Media Image Maker
This is a great tool for editing images for social media. We simply select the social network in which we want to include some image and also the format we need (profile picture, cover, etc.).
Once the image is loaded we can take a portion of it, apply some series of effects and even rotations.
I recommend you to keep these four online design tools in your favorites and keep them always at hand. Sometimes to get out of the way, other times to take ideas, but it never hurts to have a few resources.