The third blog in Wehi Web’s newest blog series.
Graphic Design Tool Kit
Apparently a poor workman blames his tools. Well today Wehi is celebrating the tools that we use everyday in a series of blogs. The series will cover tools for social media, SEO, graphic design and organisation.
Graphic design Tools
Wehi has our own freelance graphic designer. Edoardoi is often involved in larger projects for clients so is not available to curate smaller items such as graphics for our regular social media posts. Luckily with Edoardo’s help we have found a variety of resources for creating high quality graphics and images.
Inkscape
Inkscape is an open-sourced graphics editor. The software has a great community so guides on how to get the most out of this reliable tool are easy to find. Skill Share and Youtube contain some great entry level courses for Inkscape. Inkscape is a versatile tool. It allows you to use to create everything your online business needs; cartoons, illustrations for ebook covers and simple graphics. Inkscape is a great alternative to Adobe Photoshop for those who cannot afford the software or do not have the experience to exploit this tool to its full potential. It does take a few hours (not as long as Photoshop) to understand but the investment is worth it.
Canva is a versatile tool for creating quality graphics for ebooks and blogs.
Snappa & Canva
Snappa and Canva are online tools for creating engaging graphics easily. They both offer a wide library of graphics that you can use as inspiration or to adjust for your own content. These tools are free to use but Canva does have premium content that requires a subscription. My favourite is Snappa as it provides template shapes specific to individual social media platforms. This means you don’t have to fiddle with image size when broadcasting content across multiple platforms. Snappa allows you to quickly build a library of content for your social media profiles. I generally use Snappa for social media posts and Canva for larger engaging graphics such as posters or infographics.
Sqoosh
Squoosh is useful for shrinking images to reduce bounce rate and changing image formats.
Squoosh is a tool that compresses or resizes an image to better fit the platform the image will be used. Why use Squoosh? Because not all images are created equal. Not every image you design needs to be a 4k widescreen masterpiece. Squoosh is very easy to use; it is literally just drag and drop. The slider in the centre of the screen shows the before and after of the image adjustment so you can be sure it meets your requirements. I have attached a brief guide by Target Internet here for those looking to find out more about this tool. I discovered this as a way of shrinking images to reduce bounce rate. You can read more about optimising images for SEO in our blog here.
Links
I have included the tools that have had the greatest impact on my and Wehi’s working day. Each app took a small window of time to get used to but have returned this investment becoming valuable tools. Not all of the above tools will be an exact match for your business or start-up but they are a useful place to start. Exploring these tools will help you to understand how you work day-to-day and the areas you need a tool to sharpen up your practices. I regularly explore new tools and compare them to our current arsenal. This quest keeps Wehi flexible and allows us to allocate our time to what we love doing; building professional websites for interesting projects.
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Comment below now to suggest other handy tools or ask questions about the tools above.