Best Graphic Design Software For Beginners

What is Graphic Designing?

Graphic design is an art and a profession where the activity comprises projecting visual communications whose intentions are to transmit specific messages to social media with specific objectives.

This is an interdisciplinary branch of design.

In this branch, visual content is created by combining text, pictures and more in an advertisement, magazine, or book and messages are communicated through this.

Visual hierarchy and page layout techniques are applied to meet users’ specific needs.

We also known graphic design as visual communication design, visual design, or editorial design.

Graphic designers play the roles of an encoder or interpreter of the message in the communication process.

The design work always begins with a client’s demand. The demand ends up being established linguistically.

This linguistics then gets manifested in the graphical form.

Who is it for?

There are many people out there who are learning graphic designing these days or even wanting to try out some of their skills in a basic app before moving on to more complicated stuff.

This article is for those amateur graphic designers and beginners who are looking for graphic designing software with simple features and functions.

At the end of this article talks about the best five graphic designing softwares for beginners.

Keep reading to know more.

Advantages of Graphic Designing

• Graphic designing helps with professionalism and consistency.

When a company uses logos, advertisements and stuff like these, then their market impression increases. The audience views a company as more professional if they use more graphical representation, such as logos, pictures, designs, and so on. This visual consistency aids your marketing efforts, which helps your company or brand gain more recognition.

• Graphic design helps a company or a brand gain visual identity.

This reflects your company’s values and missions. A company’s recognition begins with a great logo which later helps the brand expand into a more wide business. The ads, logos, brochures, templates, these work together to build your company’s identity.

• Beyond creating an identity for your brand or company, graphic design helps in communicating more with the audience.

The logos, brochures and stuff interest and attract more audiences and then they will want to know more. Visual aids also help in communicating your idea in a better way.

• `Graphic designing helps in building trust, goodwill and loyalty.

Having a personal logo. Advertisements and brochures and all help a company create a professional appearance. A professional appearance builds trust and credibility. This is very essential to help with the growth of your business. Trust also plays a crucial role among the buyers of your company.

The points I have mentioned above ultimately lead your company to gain a better market position, which ultimately helps with an increase in sales.

Disadvantages of Graphic Designing

• Just like a lot of concepts in this world, design, too, is a subjective concept.

For one something might look good, but for others some other thing might look good. So yes, if you are working for some company and they do not have the same opinion of best as you, then it might become a trouble for you to produce work that pleases both you and your boss and the entire company.

• Sometimes the work can become overwhelming.

If you do not set boundaries for your work, then the requests of re editing can become truly overwhelming. You would be asked to keep reediting by your clients and customers until they get over one hundred perfect satisfied. So yes, ultimately it gets tiring and frustrating if you do not have your boundaries and ground rules.

• Everyone thinks graphic designing is easy when they do not know the reality of it.

People give you impossible deadlines thinking that making a logo or an advertisement does not take time at all when they need so much precision and creativity that they actually take lots of time.

Now that we have covered the professional advantages of graphic designing, let us look at some personal and individual benefits of graphic designing.

• When you are a graphic designer, you can make use of both sides of your brain, including the creative and analytical side. When designing something, you are not only making use of your creativity to design something but also making use of your intellect and analytics to use the designing tools within a graphic design software.
• You can freelance from home if you have graphic design skills. Or you can also work in the office of a company. It is all up to you how you want to put your graphic designing skills to use. Either way, you can earn with the help of your skills.
• Other people will easily appreciate your work as a graphic designer. As it is a visual art and most people are more attracted towards visual things, you will get lots of appreciation for the work you do and the results you produce.
• Graphic design is a highly desired skill in more than most industries. Every industry relies on visual aids such as logos, advertisements and brochures to promote their company and brand. Because of this, every industry needs a graphic designer, hence this makes graphic designing a highly coveted job.

Top Five Graphic Design Software For Beginners

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS.

Created by Thomas and John Knoll in 1988,the software quickly became the industry standard not only in raster graphics editing, but in digital art unit.

Photoshop has various graphic designing features and colour tones such as RGB, CMYK, CIELAB, spot color, and duotone.

Other than raster graphics, Photoshop can also be used for vector graphics and used to make 3D models and such.

For beginners, it would be good to start with a popular and most used app like Adobe Photoshop.

Also read: Best Graphic Tablets in India for Photoshop, Designers & Teaching

Lucidpress

Lucidpress, developed by Lucid Software, is a web-based desktop publishing software application

This software is used to create flyers, posters, brochures, newsletters, magazines, business cards and presentations.

They build this application on web standards such as HTML5 and JavaScript. It is supported in modern web browsers including Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 8+.

For beginners, this is another software where they can explore their graphic designing skills.

Canva

Founded in Perth, Australia, by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams on January 2012.

Canva is a graphic design platform, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and all other kinds of visual content.

The app also has several templates for the users. The app is totally free to use but also offers paid subscriptions such as Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise for additional features.

Users can also pay for the printing and shipping of the physical products.

Available for both mobile and PC, with very easy-to-use features, Canva is one of the best graphic designing software for beginners.

Adobe InDesign

Next, we are going to talk about another software from Adobe Inc.- Adobe InDesign. It is a desktop publishing and typesetting software application.

This app or software is used to create content such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, books and ebooks.

With features similar to Adobe Photoshop and a few other basic graphic designing features, Adobe InDesign makes for one of the perfect graphic designing softwares for beginners.

Check this out: Best Video Editing Laptops for YouTube Content Creators in India

Inkscape

Inkscape is a vector graphics editor that is free and open-source.

It is used to create vector images, primarily in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

But other than this, it can also export other formats.

Inkscape, with its simple and easy-to-use features, can render primitive vector shapes like rectangles, ellipses, polygons, arcs, spirals, stars and 3D boxes and text too.

There are also options to fill the shapes with solid colour, or rotating and a few other designing features. But it is one of the easiest to use graphic designing software.

Must read: Top Video Editing Apps For YouTube and Instagram Reels

Some commonly asked questions about graphic designing & software.

• What software is required for graphic design?

If you look for them online, or in any app store, you will find a lot of software that aids with graphic designing.

There is no shortage of softwares for graphic designers. Other than the ones I have mentioned above for beginners, there are more advanced softwares for more advanced users.

Some of them are GIMP, Affinity designer, Xara Designer Pro X and so many more.

• Which is the best graphic design software for beginners?

For a more detailed answer to this question, check this article where I have discussed the best graphic designing apps for beginners.

But for a quick reference, some of the softwares that are great for graphic designers who are beginners are Adobe Photoshop, Canva, Adobe InDesign, Inkscape, and a few others.

• Where is graphic designing used?

Nowadays, graphic designing has its uses everywhere.

Yes, everywhere.

Be it a company, a brand, a school, a personal business, graphic design is used everywhere.

From brochures, to flyers, to advertisements to company and brand logos, everything is done with the help of graphic designing.

• Can anyone learn graphic designing?

Graphic designing is easy to learn if you are dedicated enough and have enough creativity in you. So yes, if you really want to learn graphic designing, then of course you can, with a proper coaching and course.

Last words

In conclusion, I would like to say that graphic designing is not a straightforward task but also is one of the most coveted skills of today.

Anyone can learn graphic designing from online courses and coaching, but they need enough dedication and a knack for creativity.

For all the beginners out there, I would encourage them by saying that you have chosen an impressive skill to hone.

It will really come in handy for you in many aspects. Start with easy-to-use apps like Canva and Inkscape then move on to more complicated stuff like GIMP, Adobe softwares and XARA and more like those.

An art always needs to be honed, so the more you practise, the more experience you will gain.

This will help you a lot. So why wait, get access to one of these softwares today itself to test out your graphic designing skills.