Eye-catching and beautiful graphics rule digital media. Any business requires graphics in its brand promotion creatives to showcase their brand and convey their message clearly. Whether you wish to make a featured image for your blog or edit product photos for posting on social media, you need the best graphic design software to make or edit your graphics.
Graphic design software has been used for many years. But as digital needs are increasing, software is getting equipped with advanced features. There are lots of various graphic design software available online with advanced features, though their end goal is similar. Before moving ahead, let us understand what graphic design software is and why it is important for your brand’s promotion.
What is Graphic Design Software?
Well-built graphic design software is one that enables both amateurs and advanced designers to make or edit graphics (image or visual representation) catering to brand needs. Graphics are generally a combination of relevant text and customized images that cater to a business’ requirements. Graphic design software contains thousands of templates and a variety of tools to help you in creating the graphics. From basic tools like crop, brightness, aspect ratio to advanced features such as animation, 3D drawing, it provides a variety of tools to ease the process of designing.
Benefits of Using Graphic Design Software
Both small and large businesses can benefit from graphic design software. Some of the benefits are mentioned below.
- Boost marketing of the brand
- Increase brand awareness
- Create a positive impression
- Build customer loyalty
- Improve conversion rate
- Strengthen digital presence
- Enhance user engagement
- High-speed communication
- Better recall value
- Improves customer retention rate
Now that you are aware of the benefits of graphic design software, let us move ahead to learn top 7 graphic design software which can help you in designing the most stunning graphics.
Top 7 AI Graphic Design Software
Here is the list of the top 7 free AI graphic design software to create your own graphics:
1. Appy Pie Design
To create stunning banners, logos, product photos and to edit other visuals, Appy Pie Design is the best graphic design software. You can easily create visuals for your business on your own whether you are a beginner or professional designer. Some of the unique features of Appy Pie Design are:
- Intuitive interface for users
- Availability of thousands of professionally designed templates
- Drag -n-drop feature to customize and tweak the graphic
- Ability to decide and resolution of visuals beforehand
- Allow to connect, collaborate and share design projects
- Cloud storage to save and access creatives from anywhere, anytime
- Real-time update is possible
Appy Pie Design is one of the best available free software online to design graphics. It encourages everyone to become an artist and create their designs without investing much time, money and effort.
2. Photoshop
Photoshop has every exclusive feature which can create and edit graphics. Some of its striking features are as follows:
- Both classic features like pen tool, crop, retouch; and advanced features like changeable patterns, finger control brushes
- Easily customizable layouts of windows for a user-friendly experience
- Quality templates for graphic and web, painting, photography, and much more
- A robust package of editing tools to create a naturalistic artwork and composition
- Responsive software, i.e. available for both a mobile app. and web users
- Open-source GIMP can be easily downloaded and installed to the system for free
- 3D design capabilities like managing depth by isolating elements from backgrounds, adding a shadow, and much more
- Adobe Creative Cloud for synced libraries, stylus input support, artboards, etc.
Adobe Photoshop is one of the most trusted software for graphic design. It enables users to edit from a small portion of graphic to create highly advanced designs of banners, posters, websites, logos, or any other graphics.
3. Illustrator
Illustrator is a widely used standard vector graphic software. It can be used to design everything from web pages to mobile graphics. It is popular due to various features, some of which include:
- Offers toolset for creating illustrative artwork, business logos, product packaging, and many other creatives
- Provides creative freedom to turn shapes into logos, create typography, trace, and recolor graphics, etc.
- Keeps graphic crisp even after scaling to any size
- Drag and drop feature to customize the preset layouts
- In-panel editing to edit multiple artboards and maintain consistency across boards
- User-friendly interface
- Availability of customizable templates and thousands of fonts
- Compatibility with both web and mobile versions
- Creative Cloud for storing and managing all creatives in one place
From posters to social media posts, Illustrator lets you design beautiful graphics. You can use Illustrator to customize designs, fine-tune some pre-existing images, and create new graphics from scratch.
4. CorelDRAW
The CorelDRAW Graphics Suite enables users of all skill levels to design vector illustrations, layouts, etc. It is one of the fastest and pro-level graphics suites with a variety of features. Some of the features include:
- Enables designing of flyers, brochures, web graphics to editing images professionally
- Accessibility of high-resolution digital images, font designs, beautifully designed templates, hundreds of gradients, vector, and bitmap fills
- Creative freedom to change the size of icons, toolboxes, options for opening documents, the color scheme of the window’s border, and much more
- Toolbox is equipped with advanced tools like pointilizer for variable parameters, surface pen for working without lag
- Allow 2D drafting and 3D designing
- Export files in over 48 formats like JPG, PNG, TIFF, and many more
- Exclusively available for the iOS users - iPhone, iPad, or any other device
Most of the graphic design software is a vector drawing package, but CorelDRAW has a desktop publishing feature. It enables users to design projects on a multi-page layout. Anyone with a creative knack can experiment with designs and make their graphics on their own.
5. Affinity
Affinity is another popular graphic design software for both beginners and advanced designers. It is equipped with a huge range of toolsets to make and edit highly accurate graphics. It offers a variety of features, some of which are:
- Smooth and fast photo editing experience
- Provides a versatile customizable grid system
- Helps to control over angles, spacing, subdivisions for accurate layouts
- Offers environments for both pixel and vector art, without any extra application
- On-screen guides to ensure accurate alignment and measurements of objects
- Various features like zoom for the precision of more than a million per cent; rope and window stabilizers for vector illustrations; Boolean operations for combining different shapes, and many more
- Cloud storage for managing all creatives at one location
- Group of designers can work together on a common project
- Available for both desktop and iPad users
- Highly affordable, easy-to-use, and faster software
Affinity caters to a wide scope of needs including designing for web, concept art, vector illustrations, wallpapers, and much more. This software gives complete creative freedom to make the best of designs.
6. Inkscape
Inkscape caters to everyone’s needs whether an illustrator, web designer, or someone who wishes to design vector images. Inkscape is one of the most widely used graphic design software as it lets users turn simple graphics into beautiful artwork. Some of the features which make Inkscape stand out among competitors are:
- Phenomenal user experience with its easy-to-use features
- Suitable for everyone from amateurs to advanced designers
- Provides measurement tools like mesh gradients, checkerboard background, Bezier handles for managing movements of nodes, etc.
- Available online free of charge
- GPL licensed cross-platform app
- Available for Windows, Linux, and Apple Mac versions
- Have open-source code and can be personalized as per needs
- Allow creating scalable designs that won’t be affected when resized
- Broad file format compatibility
You may doubt its credibility as it is available at no cost but Inkscape is worth giving a shot! This software has a variety of drawing tools to design multiple creatives. Inkscape projects can be exported in all possible formats suited to web browsers.
7. Adobe XD
Adobe XD lets designers turn their imaginations into reality. It is a fast, powerful and highly efficient graphic design software. You can effortlessly design websites, mobile apps, banners, posters and every other creative feature that is needed to promote your business. Some of the unique features of Adobe XD include:
- Easy 3D transforms
- Require less time to nudge and adjust new elements
- Import creatives from Photoshop, Illustrator and Sketch
- Responsive resizing for different sizes
- Enable to combine layers and images from creating stylistic effects
- Variety of vector designing tools for drawing shapes, lines and paths to create layouts
- Voice prototyping to create voice commands and sound enabled features
- Password protection to share links and designs
- Easily integrate with apps like Dropbox, Microsoft Teams, Jira and more
Adobe XD with its fully customizable user interface kit provides the richest experience of designing graphics. This software allows you to invite people into the process and gather their feedback for your designs.
Summing Up
One size does not fit for all. Similarly, graphic design software cannot cater to the needs of everyone. The best way to choose graphic design software is to get hands-on experience by experimenting with a few of the top options. Be sure to select the one which is compatible with your designing skills and best suits your brand needs.
Keep experimenting with your creative instincts!