Whether you need this software to help you start a blog like this one or edit product photos for your ecommerce business, selecting the best graphic design software can take your brand identity to the next level.
“Design adds value faster than it adds costs.” – Thomas C. Gale
A capable graphic design tool not only enhances efficiency, but it also helps in putting stunning creativity into real-world design.
1. Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is synonymous with photo editing for graphic designers. It is one of the most popular photo editing software tools in the market in a robust package that offers excellent graphic design capabilities.
Key Features:
Design Tools: Offers a lot of design tools for both mobile apps and web
Creative Cloud: Its active synchronization with Adobe Creative Cloud offers a lot of unique features, including Content-Aware Crop, Face-Aware Liquify, Artboards, the Design Space view, synced libraries, a glyph panel, Cloud Documents, touch, and stylus input support, among others.
User Interface: Adobe is continuously working on delivering a more customizable user interface. It offers several targeted workspace layouts, including Graphic and Web, Motion, 3D, Painting, and Photography, Designer can also create your own custom layout of panels and windows.
Open-Source GIMP Software: If you don’t want to pay a dime, then you can download and install this software for free. Consider installing it on a powerful machine to avoid lag and other performance issues.
Its slick user interface offers a lot of assistance for easy use
Got a rich set of typography and drawing tools
Comes loaded with 3D design capabilities
Offers a library and photo management with Adobe Creative Cloud
Efficient file transfer between different programs
Multiple design tools come with responsive graphics
Ability to edit animation and video layers
Users can define the size of the canvas, create custom brushes, work in 3D, isolate elements from backgrounds, among others.
Cons:
Adobe now offers Photoshop along with the subscription of Creative Cloud. The recurring payment turns out to be more costly, and people who want to buy software forever don’t have the option to buy a perpetual license
A plethora of features might overwhelm a new user
Offers lessor support for raster and vector images like SVG files
2. Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is a must-have software tool if you are in the business of publishing. It offers excellent capabilities to design stunning magazines, info sheets, and brochures while easily exporting them to PDF or HTML.
Easy To Use: Unlike PhotShop, InDesign requires a low learning curve. That means new users can quickly learn how to combine text and graphics to achieve the best results.
Adjust Layout: The ‘Adjust Layout’ feature empowers the designer just to change the text of the template, and design gets adjusted automatically, which is great for infographics.
Sensei Technology: Adobe’s AI-powered Sensei technology ensures automatic resizing and arrangement of images.
Adobe InCopy: Designers can leverage InCopy to work with other members of the team by sharing text, colors, and graphics.
Pros:
Graphic designers can efficiently combine graphics and texts for easier streamlining and optimizations of files.
It allows users to add tags to indexes, keywords, anchor text frames, footnotes, table of contents, and captions with hyperlinks.
It supports HTML exporting that enables web developers to export clean and simple codes during the implementation of the website’s layout designs. This works great for WordPress sites.
It can help you eliminate redundant div tags in HTML files along with insignificant content grouping.
Has the capability of resizing multiple objects and change the width and height at the same time.
Designers can leverage its Eyedropper tool to apply position or size instantly to another object within the document.
It is an industry-standard for desktop publishing.
Cons:
The less intuitive user interface can make things overwhelming for new users.
Not positioned for general users. Suitable for enterprise use only.
Relatively expensive than other similar software available in the market.
PDF comment integration needs perfection
Pricing Plans:
Adobe offers InDesign at a monthly subscription of $20.99. The full Creative Cloud costs $52.99 per month.
3. CorelDraw Graphics Suite
CorelDraw Graphics Suite
CorelDraw Graphics Suite packs some pro-level features and offers a highly accessible interface that is easy to use. It is a bundle of multiple applications that deliver powerful editing features.
Key Features:
Content Exchange: It is Corel’s online digital library through which registered users can get access to thousands of high-resolution photographs and digital images. It also offers over 2000 vehicle templates, 1000 fonts, 350 professionally designed templates, more than 500 interactive frames, over 600 gradients, vector, and bitmap fills.
Flexible Payment: Corel offers three payment programs through which users can buy the software along with nominal charges for regular upgrades. It also offers an upgrade program for existing users.
Customizable UI: You get a customizable UI environment for the desktop, icon sizing, toolboxes, options for how your documents open, and window border color scheme. Users can also visit Corel’s developer community website to design macros that suit their workflow.
New Pointilizer: Corel’s new pointilizer offers a lot of variable parameters that are not just limited to regular dots.
Pros:
It offers app-wide workflow and under-the-hood innovation and performance enhancements to boost productivity
Works perfectly without any lag with Surface Pen
Users get the option to choose GPU acceleration over the default CPU while working with system-intensive sophisticated vector graphics
Smooth transition from desktop to tablet mode to leverage touch features
It offers better EPS and third-party PDF importing capabilities and leverages with their GPL Ghostscript feature
It is capable of exporting files in up to 48 file types, including AutoCAD, JPG, PNG, SVG, AutoCAD, JPG, and TIFF. It can also open 35 file types, including EPS, HTML, AutoCAD, PDF, PowerPoint, SVG, and even old FreeHand files
Cons:
Unlike Adobe, there are no complimentary mobile applications offered by Corel
Two many payment options might confuse the user
Not easy to operate for beginners
Pricing Plans:
CorelDraw is available for a 15-day free trial. Its full version is available for $474 with a 30-days money-back guarantee. You can also pay for an annual subscription for $198, or just $16.50/month.
Inkscape is a capable free graphic design software that can help designers create scalable graphic designs that won’t stretch or blur during resizing. It’s a user-friendly option for hobbyists or beginners interested in vector drawing.
Key Features:
User Experience: For free vector software, the user experience is quite impressive. Designers who are familiar with Adobe tools can efficiently operate Inkscape.
Regular Updates: Inscape has a robust community of developers that enables it to provide updates and new features regularly. Its latest update has got mesh gradients, a checkerboard background to view transparency more comfortably, improved spray, and measurement tools.
Free of Cost: It is one of the most robust and capable alternatives to Adobe Illustrator that is available as a free tool.
Manual Improvement: Users can leverage the open-source code to change the lines of code and enhance or personalize the software as per the requirement.
Pros:
Users can easily make individual text lines without frames along with the paragraph type.
It supports multiple gradients and comes with a separate tool to create complex combinations.
It comes equipped with Bezier handles to ensure more effortless movement of nodes.
Inkscape offers several well-designed and full-featured tools to create, edit, and convert vectors.
It is also capable of downloading or creating ready-made plugins.
Users can leverage different preset categories of filters to save time and effort.
Cons:
Inkscapes’ streaming text needs to be converted into plain text, for instance, before export.
The Mac version is not error-free.
Processing is a bit slower than other graphics software.
Compatibility with Illustrator is not bulletproof.
Pricing Plans:
Inkscape is an open-source platform that is available for free.
The sketch is a vector-based graphic design tool that is best suited for app, web, and interface design. It is best suited for creating interactive prototypes for UI/UX purposes.
Key Features:
Low Cost: Sketch offers a yearly subscription that is significantly lower than other subscriptions
Great For Mobile and Web: It leverages grids, snap to grid functionality, and snap to pixel functionality to avoid half-pixel renders or imperfect alignment. These perfections are critical to ensure perfect responsive design/multiple screen sizes and resolutions.
Screen Templates: It offers a library of artboard templates for iOS devices and responsive web design layouts. Designers just need to select an artboard and the device.
Custom Plugins: Designers can easily find custom plugins for specific tasks through robust community support
Pros:
It allows easy sharing and collaboration through the cloud. Designers can share the entire interface in the cloud through a simple file sharing process
Users can mirror designs on larger devices for team viewing to identify how the design would exactly look in a particular device
Users can export any layer or group as a PNG file
Sketch autosaves all the changes in the design step by step to avoid any loss of design. Significant relief for designers, indeed!
Users can leverage libraries with standard Android icons, iOS icons, and Mac icons
It requires a low learning curve
Cons:
Being a new design tool, it is not entirely polished and requires a lot of enhancement
It offers limited illustration capabilities that can hamper intricate illustration work
Screens don’t render in high resolution while accessing from the cloud
Available only for Mac users
Absence of automatic layout flowing option
Pricing Plans:
The yearly subscription costs $99 per year.
6. Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is more than just a graphic design tool that is perfect for illustrative artwork, page layouts, corporate logos, website mockups, and almost anything else as per the requirement. Moreover, it’s an industry benchmark in vector creation tools.
Key Features:
High-customizability: Adobe Illustrator is highly customizable through multiple preset layouts along with other customizability options. Users can leverage the drag and drop feature to move panels anywhere on the screen.
In-Panel Editing: Its in-panel editing feature allows designers to edit multiple artboards simultaneously to help designers work with more efficiency.
Highly Compatible: It is highly compatible with numerous devices that have different configurations from Mac and Windows.
User Interface: Its user interface is highly accessible and customizable. It offers custom viewing and space-saving features to help you work on any machine.
Pros:
Instead of stored pixels, it generates graphics based on mathematical equations to ensure crisp and sharp lines that you can print in any dimension
It creates graphics files in relatively small sizes so that designers can share them easily through a simple email attachment
You get access to over 90 million images, graphics, templates, and videos from Adobe Stock
Use Adobe font integration to select thousands of fonts and implement the most suitable font for the project
Gravit Designer is an HTML-based graphic design application to deliver high-quality vector graphics. It is one of the most suitable tools for graphic, product, or web designer professionals.
Key Features:
Gravit Designer Dashboard: The dashboard is easy to navigate and allows to switch between the tabs or switch dark themes instantly easily. Users can also easily set the width and height of the document through the dashboard.
Pages: Its pages feature a perfect blend of artboards and pages that comes with its canvas settings.
Tools and Effects: It offers several tools, including the Bezigon tool, Lasso tools, and Pen tool, among others. It also allows adding multiple fills to an element.
Portability: It offers absolute cross-platform portability for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS to enable the designer to work from any machine efficiently.
Pros:
It offers a modern user interface that is entirely customizable, engaging, and easy to use
Gravit Designer offers an implicit way to design social media posts for various platforms, including Instagram and Facebook
It offers natural flexibility through web and desktop versions of the software
It supports multiple file formats for export as well as import
It allows editing of scalable vector graphics
Users get knife and tool support for non-destructive Boolean that makes it a potent tool for user interface design
Designers can easily open multiple documents and go to the papers on the tab
Its Pro version offers unlimited cloud storage
Cons:
There is not a lot of information present about the software from official resources
A real-time collaboration feature is absent
Designers can’t run prototypes on smartphones to find out how would they look
Fonts need an active internet connection to work
Pricing Plans:
Gravit Designer comes entirely free of cost with limited features. Gravit Designer Pro is available for $100.
8.Figma
Figma
Figma is a vector graphics editor and prototyping tool which is primarily web-based, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows. The Figma Mirror companion apps for Android and iOS allow viewing Figma prototypes in real-time on mobile devices.
You can use it to do all kinds of graphic design work from wireframing websites, designing mobile app interfaces, prototyping designs, crafting social media posts, and everything in between.
Key Features
Prototyping. Figma has a clickable prototyping feature that’s similar to Craft + InVision.
Built-in Commenting. Anyone with the link can add comments anywhere on the design, similar to how commenting works in InVision. You can tag people in comments, mark comments as resolved, and even integrate with Slack.
Developer Handoff. Devs can get dimensions, styles, and download icons and images from the project URL. It’s like Zeplin, but again, you don’t have to sync your artboards whenever you update your designs.
Version Control. Figma includes version history for all collaborators. You can roll back to or fork from a previous state. This works like time machine on a Mac.
Multiplayer Collaboration. Multiple people can collaborate in real time. Similar to Freehand, we all see each other’s cursors on the screen and can draw things and make comments.
Liveshare. If you click on someone’s avatar, you get to see what they’re seeing on their screen and follow their cursor around. This works just like InVision Liveshare (RIP Liveshare).
Components. Similar to Symbols in Sketch, but more flexible and easier to design with. (More on this below)
Constraints. Similar to Resizing in Sketch, but more intuitive.
Team Libraries. You can share and update collections of components across projects.
Pros:
Collaboration! we stopped sharing screen in zoom, now we all jump into Figma and magically everything connects and flow way better.
Memory management! Figma manage all the assets so well, that we sometimes have all project assets in one single file with multiple pages and it loads instantly. Keeping everything in one place, easy to access and to developers or designers complain about they stations running out of ram!
Sharing!, getting a link to an exact pixel is magical, discussion can now have way more context than what it had before.
Auto-layouts! Although is not new in the ecosystem, Figma does a pretty awesome job with molecules and particles, so you can create better design systems that can stretch to any screen, making it a design once for all devices!
Cons:
Figma Jams sessions can be way better, there is still a limited amount of action we can use, so without a well pre-defined set of elements you ca import you are limited to what it has, I’ll say give it more out-of-the-box iconography and components we could use. Also, exporting a Jam to a PDF or PNG is not easy, for non-tech teams is quite hard to do it.
PDF import, one feature I miss from Sketch is the ability to easily drag-and-drop a PDF and have the ability to edit it. This missing feature would be a huge win for the community, for I wouldn’t use a separated app to do it.
Bitmap editing, I would hate to turn Figma into a Photoshop kind of monster, but, there are some basic things it should include like: Select area copy/paste, easier magic wand, ability to make a distortion without using a 3rd party plugin.
Version History per page, sometimes it’s difficult to find a change on the universe of all changes, would be nice if one could check only the previous changes to a selected page.
Pricing Plans:
Figma comes entirely free of cost with limited features. Figma Pro $12 per editor/month and for Organisation it’s cost $45 per editor/month.
Thank you for reading, If you have reached so far, please like the article, It will encourage me to write more such articles. Do share your valuable suggestions, I appreciate your honest feedback!
"Hi there, My name is Anup Maurya. I have a passion for programming and previously worked at TCS, one of the best global IT services and consulting companies, as a System Administrator. I also enjoy graphic design. It's a pleasure to have you here."
