5 Free Graphic Design Tools for Small Business Owners

Posted on: October 18, 2022 | Investing

Making your business known and grabbing your potential customers’ attention can be a challenge. From real-world signs, posters and flyers to digital Facebook and Instagram posts, graphics are a great way to quickly, effectively showcase your business. Doing this requires some graphic design tools. We collected a list of easy-to-use, free graphic design tools for small business owners, so you can create exceptional graphics without breaking the bank.

How Vending Business Owners Can Use These Tools

There are many ways to use graphic design tools. Vending machine owners might use these tools to create larger signs on main roads or thoroughfares, and bring new traffic to your machine. Or, you might use these tools to create flyers to advertise a new opening of your machine, or pass them out to nearby homes, businesses, and apartment buildings. You could also use tools to create instructional signs around your machine. You could even use these tools to create social media posts that stand out.

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Here’s a quick breakdown of a few of the ways you might use these free graphic design tools to advertise your small business, including vending machines and others:

Outdoor signs: You might use outdoor signs to literally point customers towards your business from busy roads and walking areas, advertise your business during outdoor events, and more.

• Flyers: Use flyers to hand out to passersby, put in mailboxes, tape to electrical poles, and more. You might include a discount code or free item to inspire customers to visit or buy.
• Newspaper ads: Mock up your newspaper or magazine ads before you buy space and you can be sure your ad will fit perfectly and look great.
• Digital ads: From banner ads to sidebars to pop-ups, digital ads come in many forms. The best ones use active language and attention-grabbing images. Many of these free graphic design tools will give you access to these.
• In-store signs: Maybe you’re advertising a new item, special discount, new menu, or special event. Whatever you have in mind, these free graphic design tools will help you mock up the perfect sign.
• Mailers: Share information about your business and deliver postcards directly to your neighbors, or use a mailing list to deliver information to the people who are most likely to visit or buy.

5 Free Graphic Design Tools for Small Business Owners

1. Canva

Canva is an easy-to-use and somewhat well-known free graphic design tool for small business owners. With thousands of templates, including ready-to-go templates for brochures, flyers, posters, postcards, social media ads, book covers, and many more, Canva makes it easy to create the graphic assets you need, fast. This graphic design tool has many of the features that users commonly rely on, like transparency, layering, frames, and photo effects, without overwhelming users with a jam-packed toolbar.

2. Gimp

Gimp, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is free software that functions similarly to Photoshop. It allows you to make small and large photo touch-ups and changes, and even create artworks from scratch. If you’ve been looking for a photo editing tool to adjust effects, colors, brightness, cut and paste subjects and backgrounds, and more, Gimp is a free graphic design tool that might be perfect for you.

3. G Suite

Google provides a variety of free tools to help you save, edit, lay out, design and redesign many different images. Snapseed is a photo editing tool similar to Photoshop, but with more basic tools. Google Photos is a photo storage and organization tool. Google Sites makes it easy to create landing pages and digital graphics. Google Fonts gives you a wide selection of fonts to choose from.

Combine these free graphic design tools with other helpful business tools like Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, Google Meet, Google Analytics, and more, you can connect more of the tools that you need to one place. This will make it easier to share different documents and files across different devices or with different members of your team.

4. Adobe Spark

Adobe has made a long list of high-quality graphic design tools, but they are also expensive. Adobe Spark is a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator, with a similar, but more limited, set of tools. Adobe Spark provides a range of free templates to help you build your graphic assets fast, and provides easy access to the most-used editing tools. If you are looking for high-quality software without the complexity that an expert might use, Adobe Spark is a great pick.

5. Scribus

Scribus is a free software program that is similar to Adobe InDesign, which is often used to layout newspaper, magazine, or e-zine pages. This is also a great program for creating eye-catching flyers, posters, postcards and other materials. It’s a particularly great program for laying out materials with multiple pages, like brochures or booklets. This program makes it easy to visualize how your materials will turn out and see exactly how each element fits together.

These free graphic design tools for small businesses can help you create a wide range of powerful marketing materials. No matter what type of business you have, the right graphic design tool can help you reach the right customers.