Tools and Tips for Marketers Who Aren’t Graphic Designers:
Not every marketing professional can be an expert at ALL things marketing. Some of us are creatives, project managers, or graphic designers, but hardly ever are we all three! Here are a few tools and tips on how to make better graphics without expensive software, tutorials or online classes!
By now, you’ve probably incorporated Canva as a part of your content creation process. If you aren’t, you’re in for a treat! Canva has a free and professional version where you can create any digital marketing graphic from Instagram posts to blog headers to newsletters and more. They even have templates for creating business cards and resumes. You can store logos, fonts and brand colors in folders so that you are always following your graphics standards guide and staying consistent. One of the coolest tools on Canva is the “Remove Background” feature. It’s a professional feature, but it’s so worth the money and the time it will safe you from battling with Photoshop.
Feather Icons: https://feathericons.com/
Feather Icons is an icon library where you can source any small icons you need for graphics. They can be customized by size width and color to fit the needs of your brand and it’s FREE!
Open Peeps: https://www.openpeeps.com/
Open Peeps is a hand-drawn illustration library and its totally free for commercial use. It was created by Pablo Stanley who so generously made his entire collection available for free. You can download all the elements are customize the hand drawings any time you need that “hand-drawn” look without paying for licensing.
Fonts Ninja: https://www.fonts.ninja/
It’s a Chrome extension that allows you to search and identify fonts on any website. The best part about this extension is that you can try before you buy and actually implement the font into the design you’re working on to make sure it looks the way you want it to.
This might be our most used tool because it’s so easy, so accurate and a must-have when making graphics that follow your graphics standards guide. ColorPick is a browser extension that identifies panton color codes from any website. You just click the extension, hover over the color you want to identify, then copy and paste into the application you’re using to make your graphic. It’s totally FREE and so cool!