If you’re looking for the best graphic design software specifically for UI design, prototyping and/or making icons, then you might want to consider Sketch (at least if you work on a Mac). It doesn’t have the depth of software like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer, but we think it has everything that most people need for UI design and is actually easier to use if you only have that purpose thanks to its stripped-down, minimal interface.
We found that Sketch makes it easy to get started, with less of a learning curve than those of more fully featured vector design software. It offers a good range of features if you need them, though, thanks to a big library of plugins. The software came in for a major revamp in 2021, with the addition of better collaboration features. For example, developers can now view, inspect, and measure your Sketch designs in any browser on any operating system.
Why it is a great software for graphic designers:
Sketch is great for most graphic designers looking for software that’s not too complete but not lacking in function, it strikes a great balance for most graphic designers.
PROS
- This graphic design software is easy to use with a good range of features.
Cons
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Affinity Designer is a graphic designing and UX solution that helps businesses create concept art, logos, icons, UI designs, print projects and mock-ups, among other illustrations. It enables web designers to build and preview gradients, adjustments, effects, transformations and curve edits in real-time. In terms of function and style, Affinity Designer is an impressive, low-budget alternative to Adobe Illustrator. It’s suitably simple for beginners to use as a learning tool but sufficiently powerful for freelance graphic artists on a budget.
Why it is a great software for graphic designers:
Affinity Designer is a great Image editing tool that helps businesses edit and enhance photos, create digital drawings & store files in a centralized repository. Best for Low-Cost, Full-Featured Vector and Raster Editing
PROS
- Enables graphic designers to build and preview gradients, adjustments, effects, transformations and curve edits in real-time
Cons
- Lacks the more advanced features of adobe products such as Illustrator and photoshop and CorelDraw
Pricing:
$54.99 on Windows or Mac or $19.99 on iPad — subscription free.
- Lack of extended functionality of major graphic design software such as adobe illustrator and photoshop.
Gravit Designer is a full-featured free vector design app right at your fingertip. Gravit Designer is a Graphic Design that helps you create designs for free. It has features like an SVG editing tool, presentation, options to set the height and width of the document, and 19 preset dimensions for print. Gravit Designer has a wonderful deployment supporting various operating systems and very customizable designing options, which helps the user to create beautiful effective marketing materials.
Why it is a great software for graphic designers:
The main benefits of Gravit Designer are its free software, advanced and intuitive dashboard, customizable interface, drag-and-drop functionality, and advanced editing tools. What is good about Gravit Designer is that aside from being free, it offers a set of helpful features and tools that can match other solutions on its class. Among its remarkable features is the SVG editing tool that offers users unparalleled precision. Knife and tool support are also available for non-destructive Boolean, which makes it great for UI design.
PROS
- SVG editing tools
- free and paid graphic design software
Cons
- Supports only up to 300DPI
Pricing:
Starting Price: $99 per yearFree Version: Free Version available.Free Trial: Free Trial available.
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Paintshop-pro
11. Corel Paintshop Pro 2023
Corel PaintShop Pro is a raster graphics editor and digital photo editing software developed and published by Corel. It is designed to be a more affordable alternative to Adobe Photoshop, and is geared towards photographers and graphic designers.
PaintShop Pro includes features such as layers, masks, color adjustments, and filters, as well as tools for creating graphic designs and web content. It also has tools for managing and organizing digital photos, including a built-in photo browser, batch processing, and support for EXIF metadata.
One of the main advantages of PaintShop Pro is its price, which is significantly lower than Adobe Photoshop. It is also known for its user-friendly interface and helpful tutorials, making it a good choice for beginners and casual users. However, it may not have all the advanced features and tools that professional designers and photographers require.
Why it is a great software for graphic designers:
IF you are a graphic designer or a photographer of both looking for that is either more comfortable with Corel draw, or looking for a cheaper graphic design software alternative to adobe photoshop then Paintshop pro is for you. Paintshop pro is also available at a once of price starting from R1299.
Pros:
- Significantly cheaper thank adobe photoshop.
- User-friendly interface and helpful tutorials.
- Tools for creating graphic designs and web content
Cons:
- Lacks some of the depth of photoshop in terms of functionality.
Sublime text – Text editor
Sublime text is the text editor that you are surely going to fall in love with. A minimalist coding editor, it will let you focus completely on your code. If you are working on websites that so often graphic designers do, this will give your great power providing powerful shortcuts and tools to leap about a document, filter the file, and quickly make edits.
Extra tools for graphic designers
As experienced graphic designers who have studied graphic design and been in the industry for years there are some things that just never change. Know that there are some types of tools that are always just a massive bonus to have for speeding up your workflow and design quality.
Iconfinder
Icons are everywhere in every design from business cards to website blurbs. It makes sense for a graphic designer to have a library of icons at their disposal. The visual language is getting into a new trend and Iconfinder is the best place for designers to gain inspiration and brilliant icons. It hosts the world’s largest collection of premium icons. You can access all 2,171,326 icons in SVG, PNG, and IconJar formats. This is probably the easiest way to get icons with a license that fits commercial purposes.
Coolors – Color scheme generator
Color selection is a big process in branding and designing and often requires a lot of tweaking. This is where Coolors comes as a great tool. It is a super fast color scheme generator that creates, saves and shares the perfect palette in seconds. Choose your favorite colors and get your Material Design palette generated and downloadable. Save them to your account, or export them as PNG, PDF, SVG and more. Coolors is also available as an iOS App, Adobe Add-on and a Chrome Extension.
WhatTheFont
In your time as a graphic designer, you will have clients provide you with images of items they would like to redesign. They won’t know what the font is and instead of spending hours running through font libraries trying to find out, you can use this nifty little tool.
How it works: WhatTheFont uses deep learning to search our collection of over 133,000 font styles and find the best match for the fonts in your photo. It even works with connected scripts and when there’s more than one font in an image. Just upload an image, click the font you want to identify, then check out the results.
Stock Photo Accounts
Images are often not available or the ones provided by clients are not of the best quality. Your design is heavily dependent on the quality and nature of images and thus a stock photo account is a must for every graphic designer. Great images can help take your graphic design projects from good to jaw-dropping.
What tools do graphic Designers use?
iPad Pro + Apple Pencil
Being another Apple product, this iPad Pro in combination with the Apple Pencil is not the cheapest, but the larger display on this stylus and tablet combo is a game-changer. You can adjust the display color tones, there are more colors than the non-pro models, the scrolling is smoother and for detailed art strokes, the stylus is extremely precise due to a tighter connection between the display and glass.
Graphic designers who want something so thin they’ll barely feel it in their bag will also love the higher speed refresh rate further enhancing the Apple Pencil performance.
A setup with multiple high-resolution displays
Having two (or more) separate screen displays allows for more efficient multitasking. Of course, it’s possible to work on one screen, but it gets a little hairy especially when using a full-screen mode app.
Multiple displays:
- Help you avoid icon clutter on your high-quality screen
- Maximize screen real estate
- Help you work faster and more efficient
- Professional graphic designers and digital artists who maximize clients and spend long hours on projects will benefit from the organization two screens provides.
Reliable hard drive or online storage.
Want all your hard work gone because your computer decided to call it quits? Didn’t think so. Get a reliable hard drive and online cloud storage service to store your design files.
While this is by no means a complete list of graphic design software out there, such a list would be massive, this is a list of what we’ve found to be the common software and tools that graphic designers use. Depending on your goals or your experiences and preferences as a graphic designer you may have your own set of go-to graphic design tools. Comment them in the section below if you really feel we missed out!
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