Essential design tools for freelance designers

“If you think math is hard, try web design.” -Trish Parr

With PM Narendra Modi’s Digital India campaign in place, almost every organisation is trying to go digital. Also, with the concept of smart cities cropping in, the internet availability and accessibility has become easier manifold. Therefore, to help the designers and to build the interests of the newbies, designing and marketing workshops are held frequently.

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We understand the apprehensions pertaining to freelancing and when it comes to choosing a designing tool, which is user friendly and economic, it’s a gruesome experience. Henceforth, we bring you a list of design tools which can help freelancers with the same.

Adobe Creative Cloud

It is software as a service from Adobe Systems and is provided to subscription-based customers. With multiple utilities like graphic designing, video editing, web development, photography, and cloud services, it seems to be one of the most preferred and important tools for designers.

The package is a standalone kit and is complete on its own because of the inclusion of all the major features like Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, Aftereffects, Premiere Pro, Animate, Dreamweaver, Fuse, Adobe Muse, Story Plus and many more.

Creative Market

It is a platform which provides you handcrafted designs from independent creatives across the world. With a total of 8,63,953 products spread across the categories of photos, graphics, templates, themes, fonts, and 3D content, it provides a wider range of options to choose from making it easier for the designers.

Sketch

Sketch is a vector graphics editor for MAC OS, which promises to provide its users with all the free updates till one year, as per the new licensing system. The features like Mirror (for real-time preview on your device), reusable elements, and precision not only gives a user better control over the designing process but also, makes it one of its kind.

FontShop

Google Web Fonts provides the user with a directory of open source designer web fonts which is majorly accessible to all. In case you want to widen your scope of choices, you can try Fontshop which provides a varied category of fonts namely ‑ web fonts, typefaces/ featured fonts, fontlists, newly released fonts, and finally the collection of free fonts.

PowToon

“If a picture speaks a thousand words, an animation conveys an idea” is the vision on which the company works on. It provides the users with a concept of animated presentations, wherein the idea is conveyed through a story line by the cartoons. It enhances the user experience by providing economic audio visual content. Also, the fact that minimal technical skills are required for designing makes it immensely user friendly.

Canva

It is another design tool which provides provisions to design social media graphics, presentations, and other web content via a wide range of fonts and icons. Pre-designed images and illustrations are also there along with a set of filters to choose from.

Webydo and Webflow

Webydo is a user-friendly web design platform which enables users to create a responsive HTML 5 website, without writing cumbersome codes. The designs can be directly prepared in the browser and are to be dragged and dropped on the canvas thereby, generating a validated HTML code with a built-in CMS. The tool Webflow also works on a similar principle thereby, making the web designing easy.

ThemeForest

This platform provides a collection of 28,245 website templates and themes supported by WordPress, Joomla, Magneto and more. The digital assets vary across the categories of code, plugins, videos, audios, graphics, photography, and 3D models.

Henceforth, it can be concluded that internet provides us with abundant sources of data for free. The only thing that matters is searching the right content in the due time. If you are on a strict budget, it’s advisable to read the online reviews for the tools and go for the free trials before buying the tools.