7 DIY Design Tools for Non-Designers

As someone who loves design but who has admittedly little artistic ability, I’m always looking for new design tools that let me create beautiful visuals without needing to ask for help.

To save you some of the work, I’m sharing some of my favorite DIY tools for creating custom-made logos, Instagram posts, infographics, and more.

1. Tailor Brands – for Logo Design

Tailor Brands is a quick and easy tool for designing beautiful, professional, quality logos. The tool is great if you’re creating a business website or blog or spicing up a social media page.

Tailor Brands uses algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to generate logo designs that take into account your industry niche, products, and audience. While the design tool asks the user to make a few choices, it finishes the logo process in minutes and requires very little effort overall.

The AI design platform first asks the user to type in their company name and industry. After supplying a brief description of their business, users are asked to choose their preferred logo format and font types. I like that the logo generator supplies several logo options so that you can choose the one that resonates with you most.

2. Stencil – for Social Media Posts

I love using Stencil because it consistently boosts engagement on my social media posts. The design tool has a supply of 1.4 million background photos and over 650 design templates, which means I’m bound to find something I like.

The program comes with image-editing capabilities that make each image customizable. According to a Kissmetrics survey, these image-editing capabilities have helped businesses earn 84% more clicks.

The tool also lets you specify which social media platform you’d like to post on, and then resizes your design accordingly. You can schedule posts ahead of time, too, to create a full social media posting schedule.

While the Pro version costs $9 per month, the free version is fairly generous. The free version lets you create ten images per month, with limited options for icons and background.

3. Crello – for Animation

Crello is a helpful and easy-to-use design tool for web graphics of all kinds, but I particularly like using it for animation.

They have a huge image library of genuinely high-quality photos, with additional access to the photo library of stock photo giant Depositphotos. On top of that, the tool offers over 4,000 animated templates and over 2,000 animated objects, letting you create eye-catching graphics that move and sparkle.

I typically use Crello for animated social media posts, paid ads, and Instagram Stories, but it’s also a helpful tool for printed posters and flyers. After you choose a template, you can either start designing from scratch or use typefaces pre-selected by Crello’s design team. The templates are highly customizable, with lots of options for backgrounds, stickers, borders, icons, and fonts.

4. Piktochart – for Infographics

Piktochart is a helpful DIY design tool to create custom infographics for your blog posts, social media pages, and more. The drag-and-drop interface is simple and intuitive, with a very easy learning curve, and requires no prior design experience.

You start by picking from Piktochart’s library of over 600 templates. Once you’ve chosen a template, you can select from a wide array of images, interactive charts, animated icons, and videos. The platform is also easy to edit, and lets you change the color, font, or format of any design.

To enrich your infographic with hard data, the design tool lets you import an Excel file with data on it that you can then add to your presentation.

5. Snappa – for Custom Images

When it comes to customizing images, Snappa is another easy-to-use tool. The benefit of Snappa is that it makes it simple and straightforward to choose the appropriate image dimensions for your platform. The tool has preset image dimensions for social media, blogs, emails, display ads, and infographics.

Like many of the other tools in this list, it also offers a wide selection of professionally designed templates. The stock photo library is impressive and doesn’t look as cheesy as most of the stock photo libraries available online. You have the option to further customize these templates by adding graphics, texts, and various effects to your photos.

6. Over – for Mobile Design

I’ve included Over on this list because unlike the other options, it’s a mobile app. Over lets you do DIY design from your phone and on the go. This is particularly useful for Instagram and other mobile-first platforms.

Over also takes into account the importance of different image sizes, and it offers 27 preset image sizes that suit different platforms and needs.

The mobile design tool provides custom-made fonts and beautiful artwork overlays that allow you to customize your own images. It even features a clever color picker tool that you can use to match your text to an existing color in the image. The app gives mobile creatives a high degree of freedom to tweak and customize images and text.

7. Visme

Visme is another great tool for creating stunning visual content like infographics, presentations, marketing materials, reports and more.

With tons of available templates to jumpstart designs, you can easily hop right into the design editor and customize your content with high-quality stock photos, vector icons, illustrations, shapes, data visualization tools and more. Start with a professionally designed template, incorporate stunning design elements, and even incorporate animated or interactive content into your design.

Summary

I’m amazed by the number of DIY design tools available, and you can’t go wrong with any of these options. Whether you to create a custom image with animated icons or text overlay, an engaging social media post, or a logo for your small business or blog, these tools help designers and non-designers alike create beautiful visuals in minutes.