Gone are the days when all the beautiful images you saw on social media were created by graphic designers. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest have become the favoured platforms for business owners, freelancers and bloggers to promote themselves through imagery. In the world of social media, where your customers might give your post less than a second of their time as they scroll past, it’s eye-catching, high quality images that grab their attention.
Luckily for anyone who is understandably overwhelmed by programs such as Photoshop, the industry is keeping up by creating programs that make it easy for anyone to create beautiful images for their social media accounts and websites. Even if you don’t fancy yourself as being particularly imaginative, the following tools can help, and inspire you to create gorgeous images quickly and easily.
PicMonkey
PicMonkey is often the first tool that comes to mind when people think about online programs to edit images. It’s an online, easy-to-use photo editing tool that has features allowing you to: edit a single image, create a collage or design a graphic for a background or Facebook cover image. PicMonkey is intuitive, and you can jump straight in and give it a go without creating an account or even uploading your own photos. There are sample images you can use to try out the collage editing tool and there are built-in collage designs for Pinterest, Etsy and Facebook
Canva
Over the last couple of years, Canva has become one of the most popular tools for small business owners and entrepreneurs. If you need to create an image for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram, Canva offers pre-designed graphics that you can customise with their drag and drop platform. From the design-selector menu, you can choose your layout, search for images, purchase stock photos, add effects to your image, and customise the look and feel to match your brand aesthetic.
BeFunky
Be Funky is an online tool similar to Canva. You can apply photo effects, edit photos and create photo collages with the collage maker. Choose layouts for social media headers and create blogger resources and small business templates. Be Funky makes photo editing easy with the company’s user-friendly interface.
Word Swag
If you use Instagram then Word Swag is a fantastic app that you can use to add quotes and other bits of text over images. Use an image from your camera roll or a background from the included library, choose your words, then customise how the text looks through unique fonts, colours, and other bits of flair. Word Swag is free, but for $2.99 you can unlock all the fonts and backgrounds. Once you start uploading your images you will quickly realise how many other businesses also use this great tool.
PiktoChart
If infographics are your thing, PiktoChart makes creating your own infographic a breeze. This free web program gives you access to a weekly updated library of over 600 professionally-designed templates for infographics, reports, banners and presentations. PiktoChart’s intuitive editing tools give you flexibility and control over every aspect of your project. From text to colour scheme, you can match your branding to a pre-designed template.
Designing images to engage your target audience has never been easier with these easy-to-use and accessible tools. With the so many online tools and mobile apps available, the hardest decision you have to make is which one is the right one for you. Don’t commit only using only one either, try a few out and you might end up preferring one over the others, or find that using a couple of different tools for different purposes is the way to go. Have fun and don’t be afraid to experiment. Take your social media feed to the next level with gorgeous graphics!
