Can Apps Replace Your Need for a Graphic Designer?

It’s 2020 and we’ve all consumed enough media to make us experts in the industry. We take in more ads and marketing communications than any generation before us and we’re subjected to it in numerous varieties. So, when it comes to creating our own media and design work, we usually have a pretty keen eye and a good idea what we’re after.

Graphic designers can be costly if you’re on a budget or trying to minimise costs as you work to get your new app design up, running and heavily marketed to maximise downloads, but you want everything to look its absolute best. From your website imagery to your social media posts you want a good consistent brand image to be portrayed. So can you take on this challenge on your own instead of hiring a pricey designer?

Well, there’s an app, or several, for just that. Here’s some of the best:

Klex

Customise your visual assets with all the usual suspects: vectors, stock photos and funky fonts for text. Klex is a simple app but is ideal for creating custom graphics in very little time. This makes it perfect for adding a little something to your Instagram images or other social media posts if you want to push your new app launch across social media.

Perhaps feels a little juvenile but it’s not designed to be sophisticated, it’s designed to be easy and quick. Have fun with this one if you’re looking for light-hearted.

Canva

Canva is probably one of the best all-in-one apps when it comes to helping amateur designers get the jobs they need done. One of its greatest assets is the huge range of templates – they are great looking, cover a huge variety of formats and suit every need from social media banner to catalogue or presentation. It is particularly useful for social media posting templates as the post sizes are predetermined but there is everything from book covers and posters to web banners and email graphics.

It’s fairly easy to use and with a bit of practise anyone can pick it up and gradually get more creative with their designs. A superb choice for creating quality looking designs and finding inspiration while on a budget.

Pixlr

It’s not all about graphics, sometimes you just need to edit or touch up an image or piece of photography without all the hassle of the complicated tools and format options. Pixlr is that solution. It’s fairly straight forward as far as photo editing apps go, but it still has all the functionality you’d expect it to have, including red eye correction filters, basic effects and contrast editing.

You won’t be making magazine cover quality images, but it’s more than suitable for great photography for your Instagram, social media posts and email shots.