In a digital marketing strategy, the importance of graphic designing lies in the fact that it is a powerful tool to deliver brand messages, engage users, and bring conversions. As the digital world is crowded with competition, visually appealing graphics are important to make a difference and capture the attention of your audience. Simply, one can not ignore graphic designing software for a business.
In the first section, this article provides a list of the most popular and efficient tools that designers utilize to show their inner creativity. It also discusses how these tools help designers bring out their inner creativity and convey the brand message in the simplest but most effective way. The next section is about the unique capabilities of these tools.
The most efficient and popular graphic designing tools
In the world of graphic designing, there is a wide range of software solutions with built-in interfaces and versatile features. These tools encourage designers to bring out their inner creativity and utilize it in creating meaningful designs. Effective utilization of graphic designing elements including color wheel, logos, imagery, and typography results in a stronger brand identity. It also enhances brand recognition across all platforms.
Well-designed visuals communicate complex information through website banners and other media, social media posts, digital ads, or newsletters. To create user-friendly interface design, web design, ad design, and so on, graphic designers utilize these tools to the maximum. Here is a list of the most popular graphic designing tools we use:
1- Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is an essential tool for versatile vector graphic designing and editing that has gained the attention of artists and designers worldwide. Due to its flexibility and precision in creating illustrations, Illustrator is used as a graphic designing software for logos, typography, icons, and other complex representations.
Unlike raster-based files (jpeg, tiff, gif) vector images, also known as vector graphics, are files that use vectors i.e. lines and curves instead of pixels and grids. Such images involve a straight path with an ending point, featuring a combination of angles, shapes, and lines. This way, Illustrator breaks down complex illustrations into a set of geometrical shapes and lines.
Vector graphics or vector images are independent of resolutions, and designers can exceed their sizes without compromising on their quality. Using Illustrator, designers can trace an image and convert it into a vector. Additionally, they can change a vector image’s colors, sizes, or elements, making it a perfect fit for a digital marketing strategy.
2- Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a graphic designing software for Mac, iOS, and Windows, that designers use to edit, enhance, and retouch images and videos, and for photo manipulation. Using Photoshop, designers change backgrounds, add effects, and create alternative views just as required. Designers make the most of this tool by editing a large pool of images.
Adobe Photoshop facilitates designers with its layers feature, using which they can put multiple different elements into a single file. This helps them achieve a certain effect. Using this feature, they can position photos in the form of layers on top or alongside each other. After aligning the layers, they can add text, animation, or videos to fulfill the requirements of a digital marketing strategy.
With grid and smart guide tools, Photoshop makes it easier for designers to place different elements in an image. Grids are floating lines that contribute as an alignment guide for the designers but they are not permanent on the screen or while printing. When turned on, smart guides help designers in alignments of the items into canvas while drawing, resizing, or moving an object. It also ensures consistent spaces between the objects.
3- Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is another popular software solution that designers use for brochures, flyers, posters, ebooks, pamphlets, and magazines. In short, it fulfills all graphic designing needs for advertising, marketing, and corporate media. It supports the InDesign file extension format, its standard format. In addition to this, it converts designs to more favorable types including JPG, TIFF, and PNG.
Designers can integrate this tool with Illustrator or Photoshop to merge artwork across tools. Using workspace in InDesign, designers can utilize custom layouts, helping them create personalized design environments. This workspace environment gives access to all InDesign tools. They can reset the workspace or create a new one depending on their digital design needs.
4- Adobe XD
With a wide range of features and applications, Adobe XD is a vector-based tool to design and prototype UIs (user interfaces) and UXs (user experiences). Its integration with Creative Cloud makes Photoshop files and other creative tools accessible to the designers. It simplifies the designing of complex graphics. It facilitates designers in both making changes in the existing designs and creating new ones.
Just like in Photoshop, it has a layers panel, making it easier for designers to manipulate designs and images, and add effects to them. A grid is also present to facilitate the creation of responsive designs while the repeat grid feature allows horizontal and vertical duplication of elements. In case designers want to create something from scratch, Adobe XD has a diverse range of built-in shapes and icons.
5- Sketch
Sketch (formerly Sketch Cloud) is a user-friendly vector-based tool for designing, exhibiting mockups, and prototyping desktop and mobile UI. Designers also use Sketch for editing and manipulating photos. It also facilitates through its shape, text, and drawing tools. Both team lead and clients can see and analyze designs in real time.
Sketch allows designers to save the documents and files to the Cloud storage, keeping them to their workspace. Once saved, they can share those files and documents with other team members, team leads, and clients. By doing so, designers allow them to add feedback to and download the designs.
Using Sketch, designers can keep the backup of all their designs in a single place. This helps them save time and energy and keeps their content organized. After all, it always feels nice to be able to access everything at a single location. This also speeds up the designing process by allowing designers to resume elements from other designs.
6- Figma
Similar to Sketch in features and functionality, Figma is also a cloud-based tool for designing, with an additional benefit that it facilitates team collaboration. It is used for creating, sharing, and testing designs for mobile applications, websites, and other digital assets. It simplifies the designing process and serves as a more efficient designing tool, especially when teams are working together.
It allows a team lead to check and monitor in real time what a team is designing. Additionally, the team lead can follow the progress of designing a project by opening a shared file and making corrections wherever it is required. This saves countless efforts and hours that would have been wasted otherwise.
Figma’s interface is divided into three parts. The left side has a sidebar containing assets, pages, and layers of a file. In the middle, there is a big canvas where users place all the designs. On the right is a toolbar containing information about all the elements in the file. A single file can have multiple pages with one canvas on each page.
7- Procreate
Last but not least, Procreate is an advanced painting application, for mobile, iPad, and desktop. You can call it a complete art studio that can be taken anywhere. It facilitates the creation of impressive sketches, attractive illustrations, digital art paintings and designs, and beautiful animations.
Procreate has a whole library of brushes, inks, pencils, and charcoal. With hundreds of versatile and smooth brushing tools, designers sketch, ink, and paint art as required for digital assets. They can organize their brush library, import customized brushes, or simply share their brush creations.
Capabilities
Somehow, all these tools have similar features and can be utilized interchangeably for digital marketing needs. But the following are some unique capabilities of these designing tools that differentiate them from each other:
| Tools | Capabilities |
|---|---|
| Adobe Illustrator |
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| Adobe Photoshop |
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| Adobe InDesign |
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| Adobe XD |
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| Sketch |
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| Figma |
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| Procreate |
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Conclusion
In short, all these efficient graphic designing software solutions and tools play their distinctive roles in the designing of digital assets and contribute uniquely. Whether you need vector-based designs, or photo editing for all your projects of graphic designing in Christchurch, you are already aware of the popular tools. This is why we always utilize these tools and maximize the efficiency of our design projects to facilitate your digital marketing needs.