Social media: 7 of my favourite tools to create engaging designs

Here’s a series of easy apps, software and tools which I tried and that I hope will help you create all the designs you need for running your social media strategy across channels efficiently.

Since its launch in 2013, Canva has truly changed the way people design. To date, its design tool has attracted over 15M happy users across 190 countries, who have collectively created more than 1B designs. How does it work? Its integrated marketplace provides both free and paid stock photography, fonts, illustrations, and thousands of templates.

Since 2016, Adobe Spark has been an alternative, mobile-friendly solution to using its powerful editing and creation software for free and solve piracy. While Spark remains free to use, Adobe is adding a new paid feature to help SMEs create branded media content. The feature, called Branded Stories, lets users design graphics, web pages, and video stories and can set one consistent template or theme to be present across every piece of media.

Founded in 2012, PicMonkey helps people create standout visuals that make a point, express a view, and leave a lasting impression. Whether you’re making Insta posts, Facebook covers, YouTube thumbnails, web pages, holiday cards, posters or just about anything with a visual, PicMonkey can help. With thousands of graphics and templates, unlimited stock photos and cool features, users can make their creative process enjoyable, inspiring and productive.

Developed by Kaleido, an Austrian-based AI startup, remove.bg was built to make workflows simpler and faster, to foster creativity, rethink photography and design, and to enable others to build the products of the AI Century. By making complicated tech simple the experts aimed to enable everyone to benefit from the recent advances in Visual AI, from individuals to businesses of all sizes.

Headquartered in Vancouver, Lumen5 uses machine learning and AI to help create impactful, engaging videos from existing content so users can make video a regular part of their marketing strategy. The Lumen5 media library gives easy access to millions of photos, video clips, and audio files, to always have the elements needed to create the perfect video.

Multi-awarded design expert Piktochart is an easy-to-use visual communication tool that helps you tell your story whether it’s in the format of a presentation, a report, a banner, or an infographic with the visual impact it deserves. The company aims to pioneer the future of visual storytelling so that anyone can do it and is passionate in delivering stories that are more powerful, more engaging, and more enjoyable when told visually.

Born in San Francisco, Figma is the first professional-grade online tool created specifically for interface design. The design expert helps the entire product team create, test, and ship better designs, faster.