Top Graphic Design Software for 2024

Graphic design software is a category of computer applications and tools that are specifically designed to create, edit, and manipulate visual content for various purposes. These software programs are essential tools for graphic designers, artists, and creative professionals to bring their ideas to life, whether it's for print, digital media, advertising, branding, or other visual communication projects. The list lists some of the most popular graphic design software to help you create the most catchy logos, images, infographics, social media posts, banners, and more.

 

Graphic design is an essential element in product marketing. It is the visual representation of a brand’s strategy and provokes sensations and emotions that link it with its customers. And that is no coincidence since  93% of consumers think visual elements affect their purchase decision. Businesses extensively use specialized programs and resources for graphic designing: they optimize and streamline their services according to the available resources. This blog will cover top graphic design software that can help you achieve the results you are looking for smartly and effectively.

Must Read – What is Graphic Design?

What is Graphic Design Software?

A graphic design program is a tool that helps you design logos, images, infographics, social media posts, banners, and more. Creative professionals like graphic designers use these digital platforms to create art and designs faster.

By digitizing the creation process, graphic design systems offer a series of advantages to their users:

• Precision: Creating a design or artwork with a program guarantees users much more accurate results than would be obtained by hand. These solutions often include tools like objects, dimensions, and grids to ensure your work is as accurate as possible.
• Flexibility: If a professional makes a mistake or decides to change part of a manually made design, they may have to start working completely from scratch. This is not the case with design software. These tools allow users to undo an action or delete part of a design without losing the project.
• Scalability: A graphic design program often uses vector files to manage the artwork and layouts created within the platforms. Vector files can be easily scaled to different sizes without losing image quality. This allows the work to be easily duplicated and used.

Content

• Adobe Photoshop
• Visme
• Canva
• Adobe InDesign
• Adobe Illustrator
• Sketch

Adobe Photoshop

The best-known graphic design software tool, Adobe Photoshop, is the go-to tool for 90% of the world’s creative professionals. Adobe design software is the gold standard in graphic design software.

Photoshop is the number one solution for graphic design, offering \photo editing and retouching features to great brushes and textures. If you want to bring out your creative side, Adobe will give you the power to do it at a scale that suits you, thanks to its wide selection of the best graphic design apps.

Main features of Adobe Photoshop

• Advanced Photo Editing – Touch up, replace, and blend your photos with moving objects, powerful editing tools, and smart effects features.
• Simple Control: Transform photos and artwork with one-click selections, unlimited layers, and easy masking.
• Thousands of custom brushes – Create any texture or pattern you can imagine with the world’s largest collection of brushes.
• Preset Sync: Set your preferences on any device so that you can work on projects on your laptop, desktop, tablet, and more.
• Collaboration: Work with others on the same Photoshop designs with a handy “share” tab.
• Learn the ropes: Access many tutorials, videos, and knowledge-base articles to help you master Photoshop.
• Creative Cloud: Access everything from content-aware crops, artboards, facial recognition smoothies, design space views, synced libraries, and more in Creative Cloud.

Cost – Adobe Photoshop is available for free for 7 days. Afterward, pay ₹1,675.60 per month (inclusive of GST).

Explore – Graphic Design Courses

Visme 

Visme is a popular graphic design software tool that helps you create presentation images. You can create anything from infographics to charts and graphs that attract social media posts. This tool is good for beginners since it requires no prior design experience. It is easy to use and walks you through the design process.

Visme also offers a variety of templates that you can use to create your images. The templates are categorized by industry, so you’ll find one perfect for your presentation. You can also check out what other users have created by exploring the Visme Gallery.

Main Features of Visme

• Fantastic flowchart creation tool
• Great set of integrations with marketing tools.
• Robust real-time collaboration features
• Attractive pre-made data visualization widgets
• Visme Gallery to inspire you and speed up the design process

Cost – 

• Basic – Free
• Starter – US$12.25/month, billed yearly
• Pro – US$24.75/month, billed yearly

Canva 

Canva is one of the best-known online design programs of Australian origin. Its free plan is quite generous, so it has become one of the most versatile free graphic design software with the largest applications. Its multiple templates, resources, and images are 100% customizable and adapted to users’ needs.

Canva is one of the easiest-to-use graphic design tools on the market. Additionally, it has hundreds of graphic resources for tables and animated infographics. Undoubtedly, one of its greatest advantages is the possibility of using it 100% online with one of the largest capacity cloud storage. It also allows its use in team mode in a fully collaborative way.

Main Features of Canva

• Choose from millions of templates: Canva designs are easy to use and customize. You can also create your templates and save them for future use.
• Use free fonts and images: Canva has a library of images and graphics you can choose from when creating your designs.
• Edit images: The photo editor allows you to add filters, adjust colors, edit contrast, and crop out unnecessary sections.
• Download the designs: Canva allows you to save and download in multiple formats without a watermark (advertising). Also, you can share it with friends and family.
• Create graphic text design online: Create logos and use multiple text fonts.

Costs 

• Canva Free – Rs. 0
• Canva Pro – Rs. 3999 per year per person
• Canva for Teams – Rs. 6590 per year for 5 people

Adobe InDesign

It is the best design program for editors or publishers. Adobe InDesign may be your best option for creating impressive, functional results. 

It will help you to lay out texts and images. It is ideal for layout magazines, books, newspapers, and other formats. If you need to create digital magazines or interactive PDFs or are thinking of making your first eBook, this design software can help you.

Features of Adobe InDesign

• Combine Elements: Graphic designers can effectively combine graphics and text to make it easy to optimize files.
• Create links or hyperlinks: Allows users to add index tags, keywords, anchor text frames, footnotes, tables of contents, and hyperlinked legends.
• Export to HTML: Supports HTML export, allowing web developers to export clean and simple code while implementing website designs.
• Optimize code: It can help you remove redundant div tags in HTML files along with little content bundling.
• Popularity: It is one of the most recognized graphic design programs in the publishing industry.

Costs of Adobe InDesign

• Adobe InDesign Single App – ₹1,675.60/mo incl. GST
• Creative Cloud All Apps – ₹2,394.22/mo incl. GST in the first year
• Students and teachers – ₹1,596.54/mo incl. GST
• Business – ₹5,412.00/mo per license excl. GST

Adobe Illustrator

If your work or business idea is related to illustrations, page layouts, logos, typography, or 3D animation, then Adobe Illustrator is your best design program. This app is the market leader for vector illustrations to create professional designs.

Adobe Illustrator is recognized as a graphics program for making illustrations, page layouts, corporate logos, website mockups, and almost anything else according to your needs.

Features of Adobe Illustrator

• Optimizes weight and space: It generates graphics based on mathematical equations to ensure sharp, crisp lines that can be printed in any dimension.
• Easy and lightweight sharing: Create graphic files in relatively small sizes so designers can easily share them via a simple email attachment.
• Exclusive resources: You can access over 90 million images, graphics, templates, and videos from Adobe Stock.
• Access text fonts: Use Adobe’s font integration to select thousands of fonts and implement the most appropriate for the project.

Costs – 7 days free, then ₹1,675.60 per month.

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Sketch 

Sketch is a vector-based design app only available on Mac. It is a program primarily focused on web, app, and interface design.

Although Sketch isn’t designed for editing photos or print jobs, it’s great for designing icons and interfaces you see on websites and mobile apps.

Graphic designers can also preview their designs by tapping or swiping to see how they will look once published.

Sketch features

• Share quickly: Allows easy sharing and collaboration through the cloud. Designers can share the entire interface through a simple file-sharing process.
• Test different devices: Users can mirror designs to larger devices for team viewing to identify how the design would look on a particular device.
• Easy to export: Designers can export any layer or group as a PNG file.
• Access multiple versions: Sketch automatically saves all design changes step by step to prevent design loss.
• Availability of icon libraries: Users can use standard Android, iOS, and Mac icon libraries.
• Learn easily: Requires a low learning curve.

Costs 

• First 30 days – Free
• Standard – $9 Monthly / per editor
• Business – $20 Monthly / per editor

Conclusion

Graphic design software can be your best tool to enhance your company’s image, grow your marketing efforts, and generate total professional social media posts.

If you are looking for an all-in-one graphic design software that is easy to use, then Adobe Photoshop is one of the best options for beginners and professionals. It has many features and a huge community to help you with any questions. On the other hand, if you are looking for pages to design online, you should try Canva, where you can quickly create any design for free.