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Design

25 Awesome Design Tools for Marketers

June 20, 2013

It’s a visual world we live in.

Whether it’s social media or a website, users and followers respond to great design. We’re always hearing about how the placement of a button increases conversion rates or how an Infographic increases subscribers for a blog.

Visual marketing is here to stay but are you up to the challenge?

Fear not, marketers! Not everyone is a designer but with this handy list of tools you’ll be able to create brilliantly designed campaigns in no time.

Landing Page Creation Tools

Landing pages are the holy grail of any marketing campaign. The right landing page can help generate quality leads and can make or break a marketing campaign.

Here are some tools to help you build the perfect landing page.

  1. Unbounce - Unbounce is a great paid tool to help marketers build, test and optimize landing pages from scratch. Apart from just the tool, the Unbounce blog also shares wonderful insight into building the right kind of landing pages.
  2. Optimizely - While Optimizely is more of an A/B testing tool, it does have a WYSIWYG, no-coding required editor for building test variations of landing pages.
  3. Premise - Premise is another landing page tool that lets you create landing pages using Wordpress. Great for marketers already working with Wordpress sites
  4. Hubspot - Hubspot is the one of the mos preferred tools by inbound marketers and as part of it’s offering, it provides a hassle-free landing page creator. Judging by their own landing pages, this is a fantastic tool that does exactly what it says.
  5. Launchrock - If you’re a marketer on the cusp of a new product launch, Launchrock is for you. It lets you create beautiful landing pages to get email addresses of interested visitors and leads.
  6. KickoffLabs - Kickofflabs also offers a landing page editor which requires no coding and has beautiful customizable themes you can use to get started right away.
  7. Lander - Another brilliant and easy tool is Lander. With an easy editor and A/B testing built in, it can help marketers create landing pages with ease. It has a free account too if you want to test it out.

Email Marketing

Email marketing campaigns have been here for a while but they’re not going anywhere soon. Email still remain the highest lead generator for a multitude of businesses so much so that there are hordes of tools helping marketers create and optimize emails. Here are two of my favourite tools to create HTML emails.

  1. Campaign Monitor - Campaign Monitor is by far one of the foremost HTML Email tools with an editor that makes it so easy to design emails that a child could do it. Don’t believe me? Try it out for yourself.
  2. Mailchimp - Mailchimp is undoubtedly the first choice for email marketing for a lot of marketers (including us) and rightly so. If you’re looking to create a stellar HTML email but don’t have any coding experience, simply choose one of their free templates and you’ll be good to go.

Infographic & Chart Creation Tools

With the advent of visual social media, Infographics have become a popular way to share bite sized content with users. Creating an infographic isn’t easy though. A poorly designed infographic won’t get you much mileage and investing in a designer may not be possible for everyone. So what’s a marketer to do? Well, here are some kickass tools to help create infographics and data charts.

  1. Piktochart - Piktochart is a neat little tool that takes away the pain of creating Infographics. With over 100 themes and a cool drag-and-drop editor, it makes creating Infographics a breeze.
  2. Easel.ly - Easel.ly provides users with a clean interface to make simple and effective infographics. It has a few themes (6 to be exact) but also has different backgrounds and shapes. You can even upload your images and truly make it your own.
  3. Visual.ly - Visual.ly has a slightly different take on creating Infographics. You can connect visual.ly to your Google Analytics, Facebook or Twitter account to have your own data beautifully presented. I’ve tried it and it’s great for when you need to present some data to your boss or coworkers. Trust me, they’ll love it! Visual.ly also has a marketplace to help you get in touch with designers for your latest Infographic.
  4. Infogr.am - Infogr.am helps create wonderful visualizations of data. It even has a built in spreadsheet for easy editing. Fast and easy!
  5. Wordle - Wordle is a great resource for creating quick images for blog posts or emails. It basically lets users create a tag cloud of the text they enter.
  6. Tagul - Tagul is a slightly more advanced word cloud generator with fancy effects, custom colours and a variety of shapes.

Image Editing & Design Tools

As a content marketer, I find and edit images everyday for blog posts, slidedecks, emails and more. If I had to run off to our design team for every little banner or image, I’d never get anything done! Thankfully, there are a boatload of tools to help with designing and Image editing.

  1. Gimp - Gimp definitely comes the closest to Photoshop in functionality. It’s actually quite an awesome tool and has a smaller learning curve than Photoshop. Great for putting together website banners or tweaking images.
  2. Pixlr - Pixlr is a free online editor that is quite a lot like Gimp. It’s easy to use and has the added benefit of being a web based app (No downloading, yay!).
  3. Sumopaint - Sumopaint is a funky app that has beautiful filters and tools for some serious designing. A few minutes with the tool will really get your creative juices flowing. Trust me.

Button Generators

While this may not sound as important, it’s probably one of the most essential parts of designing for a marketer. The right button can make or break your conversion percentage. But why rely on a design team when you can hash out professional looking buttons all by yourself?

  1. CSS Button Generator - CSS button generator lets you easily create beautiful buttons and has many customizable options like font, size, shading, borders and more. At the end it gives you an option to copy the CSS into your code and voila! You have a great looking button for your campaign :)
  2. Da Button Factory - Da Button Factory has similar options but gives you an image instead of CSS styling. It’s good if you’re not comfortable with CSS but I certainly recommend the use of CSS buttons over button images.

Icon Libraries:

Icons are needed everywhere in marketing campaigns. Literally everywhere. Your social media pages, emails, blog posts, presentations, ebooks etc. It’s not always easy to find the icons you need so here is a great list of icon libraries for you to bookmark.

  1. Glyphicons - Glyphicons is an icon library for royalty free icons and vectors. It even has free icons (small pngs) for download.
  2. The Noun Project - The Noun Project is a free library of icons and symbols. It has a large collection so you will almost always find what you’re looking for.
  3. Icon Finder - If monochromatic, 2D icons aren’t your scene, Iconfinder has a brilliant collection of glossy, 3D icons. It’s especially a good resource for web, ecommerce and social media icons.
  4. Find Icons - Find icons is an icon library with a huge collection — Over 300000 icons and 2000 icon packs!
  5. IconArchive - Another Icon library to add to the list. You can never bookmark too many :)

For more icon-finders, check out the blog feature by Canva which enlists 50 super suave websites for free and beautiful web icons to spruce up any design project of yours.

So there you go folks. This list, is by no means an exhaustive list of design tools that marketers can use but I’ll keep bringing you more such lists in the future.

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