Top 5 design tools to help your business stand out online

Making your brand stand out online is challenging. It’s a crowded marketplace and audiences have increasingly short attention spans.

For small businesses without the budget to hire designers, making your brand look awesome and content engaging is extra tough. Thankfully, there’s a whole host of design tools out there to help you compete with the big guys. Some are even free! Here’s our top 5:

Canva is a graphic design tool which offers thousands of layouts and templates for each of your social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram. With the ‘drag-and-drop’ feature, you can create graphics with ease, all from your desktop or mobile device.

Free elements (including graphics, backgrounds and photos) mean that you can even create great posters, covers, social posts and more without paying a penny.

If it’s a new logo you’re after, Hatchful is perfect. You can make a professional-looking logo with zero design experience.

Simple, modifiable templates allow you to create a great logo in less than a minute that you can use on websites, social media, printed products and even on building signage. Even if you’re just looking for inspiration, Hatchful is a great place to start.

Unsplash features some of the finest royalty free images, especially when compared against other free image sites. Unsplash offers stock images completely free – it’s Shutterstock without the charges. It has great search tools and the ability to compile collections for your projects –  helping you find, and keep track of, the perfect images.

Piktochart is a free tool which allows you to make professional-looking graphics easily using simple templates. With their comprehensive, user-friendly editing tools you can create impressive infographics, reports, presentations and more. No design experience needed.

PicMonkey gives you the design tools to edit and enhance photos as well as adding moods, effects and overlays with a just few clicks. Hundreds of existing templates help you select the look you want to go for and infinite editing possibilities mean that you can tweak them to your heart’s content.

For more experienced designers or those who already know what they want the finished article to look like, there’s the option to create custom images from scratch to almost any size and still use PicMonkey’s huge library of effects, graphics, fonts and photos. PicMonkey can be used from a desktop or on a mobile app.