I’m currently undergoing a blog re-vamp and thought I would share some of the tools I have been experimenting with to create blog graphics:

Canva

You can use this free online tool for making just about anything (ebook covers, facebook covers, social media images, magazines, sale promo images for your store etc). Of all the free online tools I like Canva the best. It is a great alternative to Photoshop and I like that it provides you with dozens of pre-made templates that you can tweak and make your own – I have found it a great source of inspiration! It also provides you with the same template for various sizes e.g. Facebook covers and Instagram pictures so you can easily make everything coordinated.

Some of the ways I’ve used Canva:

• How to make business cards for free
• How I make my blog graphics (for Pinterest)
• How to make a monogram desktop wallpaper – you can also download the wallpaper from the free printables library which you can gain access to when you subscribe to the blog
• How to make printable labels for FREE (using Canva)
• How to add your own text to printable labels (plus FREE printable cleaning labels!)
• How to make a personalised screensaver/computer or laptop wallpaper/desktop background 

Befunky

Very similar to Canva with its capabilites. It doesn’t have as many pre-made templates (mainly business, blogger, social media and event graphic templates), as well as photo editing tools and a collage maker.

 

Photoshop

Just $10/month – you can also download a free trial to see if you like it. There are dozens of tool in Photoshop and to be honest, I probably use about 5% of it’s capabilities. This is the tool I use to make my printables.

Pixlr

(it’s like a free online version of Photoshop)

PicMonkey

Similar to Canva but does not come with as many pre-made templates that you can quickly modify to your liking

I originally used PicMonkey but Canva has social media image sizes pre-formatted and comes with more pre-designed templates I can quickly and easily customise to my liking (e.g. change the font and colour, add my website URL and done in less than 5 minutes!) PicMonkey and Canva are both good if you want to design something from scratch but don’t have Photoshop. I have found Photoshop is best for more complex designs.

What size should your images be?

Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook etc. all have different social media sizes – I found this very helpful cheat sheet from makeawebsitehub.com