ADVERING™

An impressive graphic design must leave an impact on the audience in the first instance. The challenge is to grab attention and keep them hooked on. And the only way to do this is creating a powerful graphic design.

It is very important for your business to establish a brand image, to stand out from the competitors and help establish your own identity. Every business has its own strength and so you would definitely not want to look like anybody else.

It is important that people get a feel of what the business is like before they decide to go for a product. A thoughtful design captures the audience’s or a potential customer’s attention.  For e.g.-The concept of renewable energy is completely different from a jewelry design concept. IKF crafted a well-thought out strategy for both the domains which were starkly different from each other and created graphics accordingly.

We are living in an era where everything is online even from the minutest of information. A poor interactive design will not communicate your brand’s message effectively since the visual is not read, and understood by the audience. As people respond quickly to a rich illustration you should use every opportunity to develop consumer trust and confidence. A poor interface design can develop a rather an unfavorable image of the company.

DesignBold is a tool that’s quite similar to Canva. While you’ll feel right at home in DesignBold’s interface if you’re already familiar with Canva, DesignBold does do a couple things well to differentiate itself.

First off, it has a much larger selection of stock photos. SO if you were always disappointed by the stock photos available in Canva, you’ll be happy to know that DesignBold struck a deal with the popular stock photo site DepositPhotos to make all of DepositPhotos’ stock images available inside DesignBold (for a fee of course).

Additionally, DesignBold has a whole new set of templates that you can choose from when you’re creating your designs.

Like Canva, DesignBold has a stellar free plan. Then, if you want more features, you can upgrade to a paid plan to get access to tools like:

• 20MB upload limit (free plan is 5MB)
• Download transparent PNG
• Download PDF for Print (in beta)
• Custom color palettes for your own design info
• Ability to upload custom fonts
• Magic resize tool to reuse the same design across different dimensions

The pro plan starts at $19 per month.

Like Canva and DesignBold, Snappa is another all-purpose design tool that simplifies graphic design enough to make it accessible to an average person. Quickly create images based on set dimensions or pre-built templates. Then, edit and add effects as needed to create the perfect design.

Snappa offers up 200+ fonts and 3,000+ vectors and shapes to help you create some stunning designs. And what’s really nice is that you can schedule your images to post on social media without leaving the Snappa interface.

That’s definitely handy!

Fotor is another tool that offers a surprisingly similar interface to Canva. If you enjoy the Canva interface, you’ll feel right at home in Fotor.

Like the others, you select your dimensions and then build your page from a variety of text and shape elements. Or, you can always start from a pre-made template if blank canvases aren’t your thing.

The only downside of Fotor is that, at the time I’m writing this post, their library of elements is not nearly as good as Canva or DesignBold.

Desygner is an app that’s available for both iPhone and Android that allows you to create all types of designs on your mobile phone. It’s surprisingly powerful. That is, it’s far more than just creating images with text like many other graphic design mobile apps.

With it, you can design:

• Facebook covers and posts
• Twitter covers and posts
• Pinterest graphics
• Marketing materials
• Invitations
• Lots more

For a mobile app, it’s definitely one of your best options for a Canva-like experience on-the-go. There’s also a web app version that’s on the way.

Piktochart is what Canva would look like if it were exclusively focused on infographics and charts and graphs. It’s definitely a niche use, but if you do find yourself needing to create infographics or reports, then Piktochart is a specialized tool for the job.

Piktochart includes a number of infographic templates to make it easy for you to create an infographic even if you’ve never done it before.

While Piktochart does have a free plan, you really need to go with the pro plan if you want access to the best templates and features.

Dribbble is a community of web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, icon artists, typographers, logo designers, and other creative types share small screenshots (shots) that show their work, process, and current projects. It’s a place to show and tell, promote, discover, and explore design. Headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, Dribbble began as a side project and is now a tiny, bootstrapped and profitable company helping the world’s design talent share their creations and get hired. Dribbble has become a go-to resource for discovering and connecting with designers around the globe.

Behance is one of the leading online platforms to showcase and discover creative work and a unique business unit within the Adobe Family. They strive to remove the barriers between talent and opportunity and attract millions of visitors per month. They also distribute work to other online galleries, like Illustration Served, Branding Served, Web Design Served and other, maximizing the exposure of your art. Behance syncs with ProSite, a fully customizable personal portfolio site builder and believe that “great work should spread efficiently across the globe, gaining the exposure it deserves”.

The name Zerply derives from the words “serious play”. What started with an idea between two old friends, is now the vision of a worldwide team, representing Sweden, Estonia, UK, Czech Republic, USA and Russia. Launched in June of 2011, it presents today professionals across a huge variety of industries, connecting them from all corners of the globe. Zerply lets designers, developers, and other creative workers share images of what they’re working on and has paying customers like AirBnB, Kickstarter, Voxer, Rdio, Etsy and others.

deviantART was created to entertain, inspire, and empower the artist in all of us. Founded in August 2000, it is one of the largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts with over 26 million registered members, attracting 65 million unique visitors per month. As a community destination, deviantART is a platform that allows emerging and established artists to exhibit, promote, and share their works within a peer community dedicated to the arts. The site’s vibrant social network environment receives over 160,000 daily uploads of original art works ranging from traditional media, such as painting and sculpture, to digital art, pixel art, films and anime.

Forrst is a community where designers, engineers and developers can share their work and get the feedback they need. They can learn from each other what it means to give feedback and give it effectively. All with the goal of getting better at their craft. Their goals are to listen, participate and foster a healthy design community; to build the design community’s involvement on Forrst; to position the community around quality and actionable design feedback.

If you’re new to the industry, make sure that you check out your competitors’ work in detail before you go to a designer. This will help you establish your needs more clearly. You can then choose the right designer with this knowledge.

You don’t need to necessarily have a distinct vision of the graphic design itself—that’s what you need a designer for. But you should have a clear idea of what you want the design to accomplish.

Do you want it to catch attention, drive sales through overt advertisement or through more subtle design cues? Do you want your website design to get you more web traffic or foot traffic? These are all questions you should answer before you go seeking a designer. Then, you should write a design brief accordingly for the graphic designers.

At another level of research—more like a background check—you can also check reviews, testimonials and ratings where they’re available. This will show you what previous clients have to say about working with your prospective graphic designer.

One of the most important qualities to look for in a graphic designer is flexibility. You should look for versatility not just in design, but in design skills of the designer as well. This means that you should be looking for a designer who can handle different design items well.

Your small business will need logos, brochures, business cards, signage design, websites and many more. So, work with a designer who is well versed in techniques to create a wide range of graphic designs.

A great option for locating best graphic designers your business is to crowdsource your design projects. One of the advantages of crowdsourcing is that you get your winning design at affordable costs. You can connect with multiple designers who submit their design entries to you. All you need to do is to launch your graphic design contest. Dozens of designers will respond to your contest by submitting their design concepts. This allows you to pick a winning design out of many.