29 of My Favorite Visual Content Creation Tools

But first, let's quickly jump into how to create visual content.

Table of Contents

• How to Create Visual Content
• Visual Conent Examples
• Online Design Tools for Creating Stunning Visual Content for the Web

How to Create Visual Content

First things first, you need to know your audience. Before I create any graphic, I think about the type of content my target audience responds to and what platforms they frequent the most.

For example, during my time working at a television news station, I found that our viewers responded well to infographics and spent most of their time on Facebook.

So, naturally, I'd create infographics to break down complex news updates and distribute them on Facebook.

Once you figure out your format and distribution channel, you're ready to start working on your visual content. I encourage you to be creative, think outside the box, and experiment with different approaches. That said, you should always use colors that pair well together.

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Not sure how to coordinate colors? No worries! Whenever I'm struggling to find the right colors to incorporate into a graphic, I consult Canvas color wheel, which also includes a crash course in color theory and combinations.

I also suggest using your brand's colors in your visual content wherever possible. It gives your content a cohesive and consistent look and helps you brand stay top of mind for consumers.

Use consistent, branded fonts if you‘re able to, and avoid using too many fonts. My rule of thumb is now more than two different fonts in one graphic. And don’t be afraid to experiment with tools like HubSpot's Clip Creator or any of the ones I'll list in this post.

Even if you don't use every tool, its features and resources may inspire you for future projects.

Visual Content Examples

1. McDonald‘s "WcDonald’s Campaign"

McDonald's ran an ad campaign called WcDonalds that featured ads animated in the Japanese anime style. The idea coincides with the recent popularity of anime in mainstream media and how the franchise if often referenced in anime and by fans alike.

I'm a huge anime nerd, so of course, I adored this campaign. As a marketer, I loved the bold use of color, the high-quality animation, and the fun storylines in each ad.

2. Airbnb's Instagram

Airbnb relies heavily on visual content to attract customers to it‘s rental properties listed by Airbnb hosts. The vacation rental company’s Instagram mainly consists of gorgeous photos taken by Airbnb renters, influencers, and photographers.

The result is a gorgeous photo collage of picturesque rentals, happy families and pets enjoying the amenities, and genuine customer reviews.

3. National Geographic

The folks at National Geogrpahic are pros at using visual content like infographics to rely complicated information in a way that is easily digestible. In the example below, NG uses an infographic to show readers how fires often protect California's giant sequoia trees.

Online Design Tools for Creating Stunning Visual Content for the Web

When I initially started creating graphics for previous jobs, I was completely lost. I didn‘t have much an eye for color or font combinations, I didn’t always know what images worked for the message I was trying to convey, and I didn't always know where to find the content I needed.

And don‘t get me started on the perils of creating visual content on a limited budget. Fortunately, you don’t have to struggle like I did because here are 29 online design tools to make visual content creation much easier.

Font Tools

1. Fontjoy

Need to find the perfect font combination for your next project? Fontjoy makes it easy for users to find great combinations of fonts. It uses a neural net to provide font suggestions, displaying them in real time to help you get a better sense of how they look paired together.

What I love: Fontjoy takes the guesswork out of pairing different types of fonts, something even I've struggled with.

2. Google Fonts

If you're looking for quality typography for your next design, check out Google Fonts. This directory of web fonts makes it easy for users to add a font to their website in seconds or download it to their computer to use later.

What I love: All of the available fonts are open source, meaning users can customize, improve, and share them as they see fit.

3. WhatFont

Have you ever come across a font on a particular web page and thought, "I need that?" With WhatFont, users can quickly and easily identify the names of the fonts used on any web page with just one click.

Available for download as a bookmarklet, Google Chrome Extension, or Safari Extension, you'll never be left feeling stumped about a font name again.

What I love: WhatFont is incredibly easy to use and fun to experiment with when you're looking for font inspiration.

4. DaFont, 5. 1001 Free Fonts, and 6. Font Squirrel

Looking for an extra special font to help your design stand out? While there are a ton of free font resources out there, we've narrowed down our favorites to DaFont, 1001 Free Fonts, and Font Squirrel.

What I love: These sites offer an extensive library of high-quality fonts that are easy to download and clearly defined in terms of licensing.

Templates

7. HubSpot's 15 Infographic Templates

Sometimes, you‘re just short on time and need to make a graphic or graphics as quickly as possible. In those moments, you don’t need tools; you need a template.

With this pack of free infographic templates, you can create professional-looking infographics and save hours of time in the process. The best part? You can easily customize them to fit your company's branding.

What I love: These templates can serve as time savers or inspo. The choice is yours!

8. Canva

Canva and I go together like peanut butter and jelly. I've been using the tool for both personal and professional projects for about 10 years now.

Whether I'm looking to create an ebook, infographic, business card, or email header, Canva has a template to simplify my process. In fact, the free web design tool offers professional, easy-to-customize templates for just about any design need you can think of.

What I love: Canva is built with non-designers in mind, making it easy to drag-and-drop objects and images until you like the way it looks. Change the images, switch up the fonts, adjust the colors, and voilà: You've got yourself a design you can be proud of.

9. HubSpot's 28 Customizable CTA Templates

If you want to drive your website visitors to take an intended action, you need to make it easy for them to do so. That's where CTAs come in.

But not just any old design will do. In fact, factors like color, size, and shape, all play a role in the performance of your button. So to help you encourage more visitors to become leads, we've created 28 pre-designed CTA templates to employ on your website.

What I love: These templates are customizable, so I encourage you to test different colors and placements until you find what works best for you.

10. HubSpot's 30 PowerPoint SlideShare Templates

Love the concept of SlideShare but don't have a lot of experience designing in PowerPoint? No problem.

With our free PowerPoint templates, you can create beautiful SlideShare presentations without the heavy lifting. Simple plug in your content, adjust the colors to match your branding and swap out images as you see fit.

What I love: These templates range from clean and simple to a bit more intricate, so you'll have no problem finding one that suits your content.

Color Tools

11. Coolors

I'm a firm believer that one of the most important elements of web design is the color palette. You want to make sure your images, graphics, and font colors convey your message and maybe even drive conversions.

But often, it's hard to find the right color combination for a design, which is where Coolors comes in. Press the spacebar to instantly get recommendations for colors to use, including their respective HEX codes. Your color palettes will never be uncoordinated again.

What I love: Coolors is very user-friendly and can help content marketers save a lot time finding the right colors for their visual media.

12. ColorZilla

ColorZilla is a great tool for all your color-related needs, from the most basic to the most advanced. Whether you're looking to pull up the HEX code for a specific pixel on a page, analyze DOM element colors, or uncover element information such as tag name, class, id, and size, this tool can handle it all.

What I love: ColorZilla is versatile, so play around if you want to find other use cases for your graphics.

13. Canva Color Wheel

I love, love, love Canva‘s online color wheel! As I said earlier, it’s a simple way to pair different colors for your visual content, especially if you‘re like me and don’t know much about color theory.

What I love: The tool is so fun to play around with, and I love that it gives you a quick run-through of color theory so you can learn to apply it to other projects.

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Annotation Tools

14. Awesome Screenshot

Ever find yourself drowning in 20 different programs to crop, edit, and annotate screenshots? With Awesome Screenshot, a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome, you can easily screenshot anything on the web and edit it directly within your browser.

What I love: Awesome Screenshot is easy to use and a huge timesaver.

15. Filestage

How often have you shared feedback about a PDF or image, only for it to be misinterpreted? Filestage is a feedback tool that makes it simple to leave in-context feedback on just about any file type you can think of. Documents, PDFs, videos, graphics, and more.

What I love: With a wide range of annotation and proofing features, you can draw on top of your content to bring comments to life. This makes it easy to align internal and external stakeholders in real time. And best of all, your first two projects are free.

Photo Editing Tools

16. PicMonkey

Okay, let‘s say you don’t have the budget for Photoshop and feel somewhat limited by PowerPoint's visual editing capabilities... what are you to do? If you want to spruce up your images — re-color them, add borders, add text, and even insert graphics on top — all without downloading yet another program to your computer, check out PicMonkey.

What I love: The whole photo editing process is intuitive, which means you can spend more time optimizing your blog posts instead of sprucing up its accompanying featured image.

17. BeFunky

If you love the look of cool, vintage Instagram-esque photo filters, you'll love BeFunky. This free photo editor boasts a ton of awesome features, including effects, frames, graphics, and textures.

What I love: Whether you're a seasoned designer or just getting started, the interface is super straightforward and approachable. With just a few clicks, you can enhance an ordinary photo or create a collage worthy of sharing on your social accounts.

18. Giphy

Giphy is a tool for converting portions of video into looping GIFs. You can also use other user-generated GIFs on the platform. This adds personality to presentations, emails, and blog posts.

What I love: Giphy is essentially Google, but for GIFs. Just type in the show, movie, emotion, or vibe you're looking for and see what fun GIFs pop up.

19. Adobe Express

Adobe Express is an online design tool for creating and sharing graphics, web pages, and videos. It offers access to thousands of images and icons, as well as branded templates, themes, fonts, and other design assets.

What I love: Adobe Express is great for people who are creating images on a budget and don‘t have the editing knowledge you’d typically need for applications like Photoshop.

20. VSCO

Just imagine: You‘re at an event. You’re laptop-less. And you just took an awesome photo with [insert esteemed thought leader here] that you want to share on social media... but it's a little dark. Bummer.

With a mobile photo editing app like VSCO, you can tweak your photo to perfection and share it on the fly. The app is free for iOS and Android and comes equipped with impressive, professional-looking filters and functions.

What I love: You edit videos from pretty much anywhere with VSCO, making it efficient and convenient.

Stock Photo Resources

21. Vecteezy

If you're looking for a Creative Commons image but are finding terrible options through its native search engine, check out Vecteezy. While it often surfaces similar content, Vecteezy has an algorithm that places the gorgeous images right at the top — cutting my image-hunting time down by a ton.

What I love: Vecteezy is easy to navigate and a huge time saver.

22. Death to Stock

All it takes is an email address to start receiving Death to Stock‘s high-quality photography straight to your inbox every week. From office shots to drool-inducing food plates, this stock photo service has a batch of photos to meet almost anyone’s needs.

These images can be used on your website, social channels, mockups, etc. To get familiar with their terms of service, check out their licensing page.

What I love: Death to Stock constantly updates its collection of media, so there are always new elements to choose from.

23. Stock Photos From HubSpot

If you‘re looking for stock photos to use in your next design but don’t want to worry about all that attribution stuff, well, look no further. HubSpot offers a ton of free stock photos that you can use literally anywhere.

What I love: All you need to do is download the batch and then be on your merry way to create engaging, visual content. Seriously... just do it.

24. Unsplash

If you're looking for more “do whatever you want” photos with a scenery or inanimate object tilt, check out Unsplash.The pictures speak for themselves — so go check out the website for more.

What I love: Just like our own stock photos, no attribution is needed.

Design Tools for Infographics, Charts, and Mockups

25. Infogram

If you're looking to make interactive infographics — not just plain visuals — check out this online design tool. Easily add graphs, maps, text, and even playable videos without diving deep into a design program.

What I love: It also has social sharing tools built right into the infographic, so you don‘t have to worry about creating a custom Pin-It button. It’s a pretty nifty tool if you want to create and ship an infographic — fast.

26. Venngage

Venngage is a free infographic maker that has the capability to produce charts, reports, and stunning data visualizations. You can start with a template and easily customize the look to fit your brand.

Under the free plan, you'll be limited to the number of image uploads and designs you can do, but there are more advanced plans with premium feature sets.

What I love: With highly customizable templates and AI-powered features, what's not to love?

27. Visme

With Visme, you get a whole platform for creating digital content with capabilities for presentations, data visualization, infographics, social posts, and even short videos.

What I love: You can have up to 5 projects and 100 MB of storage in the free version, plus access to a library of free templates for projects such as ebooks, flyers, and logos.

28 Miro, 29. Marvel

Depending on the sophistication of your design needs, you may find yourself in need of a prototyping app. This type of software can be used to turn your ideas — whether it be an app or a website that you've cooked up in your head — into a more tangible reality.

While many free options are available, we've selected two that really deliver in terms of ease of use and functionality: Miro and Marvel. Although both of these options offer more advanced, paid plans, you can get started with a free plan.

Time to Content Create

This list shows just a few possibilities for tools and templates that can help you create high-quality, engaging visual content for your brand. Now, you can go try some out for yourself.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in September 2013 and has been updated to be fresh, accurate, and comprehensive.

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