MARKETING | 6 MIN READ

No Photoshop? No
Problem: 10 Visual
Content Tools for
Beginners

Written by Rachel Leist

@rachelleist

Design isn't something that every

marketer feels comfortable doing,
but the reality is every one of us will
need to design something at some
point in our careers. Whether it's a
website, some sales collateral, or an
ebook, there will be some design
expertise required to finish the project.
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 The reason why we often get bogged down in it all is because
often, we don't know how to use the tools at our disposal to get
high-quality designs. But here's a little secret, marketers: You don't
need Photoshop to create great designs. Below are 10 design tools
even the most design-phobic marketers can use to create
gorgeous visual content.

1) Canva
Canva is your one-stop shop for easily creating customizable
designs. You can search from a library of images, layouts,
backgrounds, or upload your own photos to include in your
designs. You can also choose to create social media posts headers,
presentations, or any custom dimensions.

Then all you have to do is drag and drop your images into place,
resize them, and voilà! Your images come to life. 

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 2) PlaceIt
At some point in every marketer's life, there comes a time when
they need to take a screenshot to be used in a real-life scenario.
That's where PlaceIt comes in. PlaceIt allows you to upload your
screenshots and videos to be automatically inserted into various
screens. This program makes it infinitely easier to provide
professional-looking screenshots in real situations.

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 3) HubSpot Image Editor
Now live today for all HubSpot customers is an image editor right
within your HubSpot account. Crop your images to dimensions for
Twitter, Facebook, or really any size you want. Add text, stickers, or
frames, and draw anything you want right over the picture. Adjust
the brightness, take out red eye, or add filters. The image can then
be inserted right into your blog, web page, email, or social posts. If
you want to make other changes to the original file, it will still be
available right within HubSpot.

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 4) Death to the Stock Photo
It's really hard to find good quality stock photos -- especially for a
price that works for your company. Death to the Stock Photo does
all of this for us. Every month they email out a set of free non-
cheesy stock photos, so over time you can build up your library of
stock photos that you want to use. As soon as you enter in your
email address, you will get 10 free stock photos to start with -- then
you just wait for next month to roll around with even more.

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 5) NounProject
The NounProject is your best source to find all the icons you could
ever dream of needing for your next design. All you have to do is
search for the icon, and a few suggestions will come up with icons
that you may be interested in. The majority of these icons are free,
but there are some you need to attribute if you use it (don't worry,
they provide clear instructions for each icon).

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 6) 55 Free Content Creation
Templates
Over the years we've put together various templates to help our
audience create content. These include infographic templates,
SlideShare templates, social media templates, and call-to-action
templates. And all of these templates can be used right in
PowerPoint to make it easier to create visual content for us
marketers who aren't comfortable with some of the other design
tools. 

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 7) Google Fonts
We all need to mix it up with what fonts we use every once in
awhile. Well, did you know that Google offers hundreds of fonts
that you can download for free? You can even preview how the
different fonts will look with whatever text you want. If you are
putting a new headline on your website but want to see how it
looks with your slogan, you can do that. Or if you want to just start
experimenting with different fonts in your next design, you can
download the font and immediately start using it. 

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 8) Skitch
Skitch might be one of my favorite design tools ever. Using Skitch,
you can easily take screenshots and then annotate them. In the
example below, I took a screenshot of the Skitch website (meta, I
know), added an arrow to CTA to download Skitch for Mac, added
some text on top of the image, and added a box around the sign
up CTA. This program is great for any marketer who may be
providing feedback on someone's work or taking screenshots for
content that needs annotations.

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 9) ColorPicker
ColorPicker is a great tool to explore different colors that you may
want to use in your design. Simply slide the arrows on the right bar
up and down, and move the circle within the square from side to
side to find the perfect color that you want to use. You can also
save multiple colors at the bottom if you want to access them later.
ColorPicker provides the RGB and HEX colors so you can use the
exact color while designing on other programs. It is a great tool to
explore new colors and figure out exactly what you want to use in
your designs.

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 10) GIFBrewery
You may have noticed that a cool thing you can do in your email
marketing is to use animated GIFs to explain something or delight
your subscribers. But many marketers don't have the necessary
software to create animated GIFs. 

That's where GIFBrewery comes in. It allows you to easily create

GIFs from your screen recordings -- and you can even crop the
images, add commentary, or apply filters.

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 What other visual content tools do you use when designing?

Originally published Jul 8, 2014 2:00:00 PM, updated February 01 2017

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 Topics: Content Creation Resources

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