7 Fantastic and FREE Graphic Design Websites You Need To Know About

hi there Jamie Keith here today a teachers tech hope you're having a great day today I want to bring you some of the graphic programs I use quite regularly to get the job down and I do I use Photoshop and everything's for different things but a lot of times I make them on a different computer and I just need some quick graphics done I just like to be able to use the browser and log on many of these programs do have upgrades that you can purchase I've been able to get through there's one I'll talk about I did purchase but mostly I just use these program for free and it gets the job done and I share them with my students and other teachers and they like these programs too so stick around as I go through seven of the graphic online graphic editors that I think are most useful what am I go to online graphic programs is camp I've used this for many things whether it be my YouTube thumbnails channel art at school I use it to create designs on it very easy to use I've shown my students how to use this and the free account on this works very well there is an upgrade that you can access for about ten dollars a month I've never used it and I've found the free features very good I'm just gonna log in real quickly to show you kind of what it looks like here I'm gonna log in with my Google account here I hope I better do that again there I'm logged in and you can see some of the stuff that I it saves all my stuff you can see some thumbnails I've worked on some other things for Facebook but you have so many different things that you can create from templates you can see here I was just playing around with a book cover here but if I look across the top you can see if I click more you can see all these great designs that they have for you whether it be book covers or magazine covers or your social media you can also create your custom if you know that particular width and height and pixels or millimeters or inches you can go ahead and design it from there once you start with it so if I was gonna pick let's say make a thumbnail real quickly you will be able to see that what ones are the free ones and which ones you have to upgrade to pay more just by hovering over you can see that there's a dollar sign so for this one you'd have to pay for it but if you're looking for a free one as you go over them you'll be able to see right here it says free or free and I find these work very well to get the right dimensions and from there you can just click on things and you can see you have your different fonts you can go to your elements on the side and you have free photos that you can use there's lots of free ones also there's paid ones too you can see from the shapes you can add I'm not going to go through everything in here but it's very easy to just a click top resizing and as you click on the different ones you can quickly delete or link your different things so canva one of my go-to graphic design programs really easy to use I recheck I do have a video for this one getting more in depth I'll put it down below another one I use quite a bit is Adobe

spark now this one is completely free and being Adobe you know the quality is going to be there and I like the stock footage of the pictures that come comes with this one too so really quickly I'm already logged in just the same way you can log in with your Google connect with your Google account or created account but when you hit the plus here you have a few different options to the post where you could create your thumbnails and everything on this one post and you can create a page kind of like a web page where you're telling a story on the web really attractive way to present information or you can create a simple little video it's not your typical video with actual movies in it but more of a story that you're putting together where you can add your voice I'm just going to quickly click on the post I do have a video of this one I'll link it down below if you're looking for more information about Adobe spark but I'll click on the post just to give you a little quick overview here of some of the little things you can do in here so what you would do right away you could just write I'll just write example here and I could hit continue and it would just start with this you can see I have Instagram selected a lot of times for myself I'm using the YouTube so if I scroll across the bottom you can see YouTube thumbnail but you have a bunch of different template sizes started here so if I was going to go I'm gonna go back to my youtube channel show they got YouTube channel art now that's a new one here so I'll just hit continue and now you can see what you can do is I can click the Add button up here if I wanted to add another photo text or delete something I can go through and click on these if I want to just to get quick examples of these templates here and if you click on something twice if I go back to it and click it again you can kind of see how it changes it up each time too so what I like to do when I'm using this one is if I'm kind of stuck for time and I just want to kind of get a quick nice template or a nice image going I'll just kind of run through the different layouts they have and then you usually that's something that comes out quite nice so you can change the palette colors if you wanted a different color your background you can add filters to the images behind it you can see the colors you can pick your individual colors so that's for the background no so I'm gonna leave this as the photo right now I'm just gonna click on my photo here and then you can see over here it says replace so if I wanted to replace the photo in the background I can go find photo as Creative Cloud Lightroom Dropbox or Google Photos lot of times I just use the find photos so if I I'm gonna say I'll just type computer here and you can see that you'll get a list of different ones to use so if I click on it puts it in at the end you can grab to get the video to get the image that you want just simply click share and when this loads up you'll see that you'll have a download option here so I can download this option and then you said how I want to use it here so and you can see a little bit more about the sharing in this part too so definitely if you're looking for a completely free graphic design tool online check out adobe spark another program I really like is snappa so snap

is very similar to kamba I'm gonna go yet get logged in here with this one he doesn't connect through Google but you just create account in here very easy so once you're in you can see you get kind of the similar features of canva you have a paid for version that you can upgrade if you check up here to upgrade to pro I've never done it I've just always use the free version in this one

you get your social media posts I've used this again for my thumbnail and channel art on this one I I'll just scroll down you can kind of see the different ones here too but you can create your custom up top I'm just gonna go ahead and click on my YouTube thumbnail and it kind of works the same way to see the free one so it has the lock on it you know it's not free but if you were starting from I'll just use this free one it doesn't have the lock on it you can see real quickly across the top and I like how this is designed snappa here you can see from the size the resize up here to all the different things you can choose so if I wanted a different background and I like how yeah just how quickly the layout on this one were the effects I could darken change things around you can see all the different effects here I have my text I could add my headings subheadings some body text I have graphics if I really want to I could search through the graphics or I could do the uploads to here if I wanted to add a quick picture to this and move it around you can see how easy it works on this one and I have my shapes so you can see very easy to use this is another one that I like to use the free version works really well you can see I have to save I have to share and I have the download on this one for the transparent image this is something and same thing with canva if you wanted the transparent background this is part of the upgrade package that you would need to do so anyway check out snappa another great program online I haven't seen too many glitches on it when I'm working on it just go to snappa dot-com and you'll get into this one now Pixlr is a good app if

you especially if you're on the Chromebooks or something in order to get students to create if some doing some image editing with photos I would say it's well not comparable to Photoshop but it reminds me maybe a Photoshop more like eight nine years ago but it can do some very similar things and I found it has gotten better over times I remember used to be kind of glitchy if you can put up with the ads for the free version everything you can get the Chrome extension that connects right to your Google Drive too but if you just go to pixlr. com you can see if I was creating I can open image or create a new image and this is kind of more of the photo editing so a little bit differently different than the other programs that I just showed you so if you needed a hanso photo this works great with this or you can create you can see I have the brush tools and if you're used to Photoshop you can see all the tools here that you can adjust to in change from the cropping to the move to the marquee on these ones so I'm not going to go over the whole program but if you're looking for a program to do some photo editing and if you're familiar with Photoshop or maybe you're on the Chromebook and you want something do photo editing check out Pixlr it's a great option for the online in I meant here sticking with my photo editing here photo pia is a program I like a lot because I can actually open up Photoshop files in this so the dot PSD s so I'll give you an example here you can see it kind of has that look of Photoshop again it's not doesn't have all the features and everything but if you're looking to be able to open a PSD and you don't have it available to me on the computer you are try photo pia i'll give you an example here I'll just go file open and I'm gonna find a PSD here's a PSD file that I had from a thumbnail I created and you can see down on the right hand side all the different layers and so if you're used to working with layers you can access it just opens up that PSD so again similar to Pixlr in a way that it has the photo editing capability but what I like about this one if you need to open that PSD file and you can connect it right to your Google Drive again using the extension anyway so check out photo pia if you need to open up some PSD s or do a little photo editing it's definitely a program to take a look at pic monkey is

actually one i purchased a membership for very simple to use and i love the different effects that you can put in it right now I just have the free version I switched back to it but for a couple years I actually paid for this one so I'm just gonna log in to show you on this one you don't actually technically have to log in I gotta get my rate email account here on this one you could actually do it right from the start page but I'm gonna log in here on this one so anyway you can go right to edit you can see right here up top and I'm gonna just

upload a photo to edit I'm just gonna grab something from my I just took a picture here I'm gonna upload this one from my computer here and I'm gonna just do some effects here so the quality of this photo might be a little blurred I just took it a quick one with my camera with my video camera here so I'm gonna go to I just show you some of the different options you can see under the basic edits of crop I can go through and I can apply a different cropping to this if I move this a little bit if I just wanted my face maybe this little are with this round and then I can hit apply and you can go and get an idea of the different things you can do I think I'm just going to click on a few of these you can see if you're even adding makeup I could go through and fix different things I could add text to this going through the overlays I could add some different things on this one maybe if you wanted maybe if I wanted then as I forgot I had the free version here so this is that some of these things are a paid-for wand here what I'm going to go to is something I've kind of shown the kids before at different parts the year so I'm gonna Adama fie myself here so if I go to zombies and I want to go over my skin here all I have to do is go over my skin and it's gonna turn me in to a zombie on this one so really simply I could have fixed my eyes after I won't do this for too long here but this is something the kids really like you can you know from vampires zombies at Halloween you can see the zombie bruise and I'm gonna apply this I'll play this and as I go through you can add if I wanted to go to different parts on this but I think you get the idea you can have a lot of fun adding effects in PicMonkey here they do have templates that you can work for again the upgrade feature on this one so like I said this is something I have paid for right now I'm just on the free version again but PicMonkey I definitely something you can create a lot of god cool graphics in and if you have the students play with it again that counts it's they get a lot of entertainment out of this one lastly what I want to show you is vector so if

you want to make vector images so you don't want to lose quality as you resize them try this one here so if you're thinking of a similar product like Adobe Illustrator which make your vector images this one you can download it it's free but you can use the online version too so I'm just going to click on the online one and this is free you can see this is a temporary file if I want to save it I need to log in to save my work but I'm not going to log in right now just quick overview you can see the four options on this what you can create when I select the tools down the left hand side and then I can change the colors and different things on this side here so if I keep going down you can see I have my rounded rectangle my ellipse my pen tool so if I wanted to create my shape so if you're doing logos on this one make sure a switch here you can see I can change the width and everything the border of this one I'll just create a shape here continuing down you can see that you have your text that you can just click and then type something on this one here I did it twice you can upload an image here and you can add the shapes in here from here so if you're looking for a vector program to create as I said those vector graphics that allow you to resize and it won't degrade the quality of the image try this one it's free the online it has the option to download this one too so I hope you like these seven tips that are seven websites I gave you for these remember these are free examples but there's usually upgrade options but I find a lot of times with the free examples they were pretty well I've never really had to go ahead and buy any those I didn't mention that I have bought PicMonkey done locket to get some of the other features for a year or so but now I'm kind of switched back to using them free so try them out I find they worked very well especially for different things from anything from home use the classroom use remember I do these weekly tech tips and if you like what you see please subscribe to my channel share this with other people so they know about the graphic programs and if you know of other graphic programs and I know there's lots out there I had to kind of pick and choose which ones I wanted to show you today I just put it them down in the comments down below and then maybe I can make a follow-up video on this one so thanks for watching today and I'll see you next week