The landscape of graphic design is changing. Those old days of software at a ridiculous cost and endless design tweaking may now be coming to an end. Artificial Intelligence has crashed the party, bringing an armada of free tools with the potential to change the game for both experienced designers and inquisitive newcomers.
For that reason, in this blog post, we discuss nine of the top free AI tools for graphic design that supercharge your workflow and take your creations to another level.
Why Adopt AI in Your Design Journey?
There are several reasons why one should incorporate AI into the workflow for graphic design:
- Boost Efficiency: AI aids in automating mundane tasks such as background removal, color palette building, and image resizing so you have more time to focus on the creative part of design.
- Spark Inspiration: AI-powered suggestions can push you over the creative roadblocks for layouts, fonts, and visual elements you may never have thought about.
- Design Quality Improvement: AI can enhance your designs by proposing adjustments to the composition, balance, and use of white space.
- Accessibility for Beginners: AI tools with user-friendly interfaces make graphic design accessible, even for those without extensive design experience.
9 Free AI Tools That Will Enhance Your Design
Let’s take a look at free AI tools that fulfill various needs in the workflow of graphic design:
Canva: Canva is a user-friendly place that comes with many free templates, pictures, and icons. The app is AI-powered with its “Magic Design” feature; it even suggests the layout and design elements needed for your suggestions, hence great for novices or if one just needs a jolt of inspiration to create an awesome design. However, customization options are rather limited under the free plan.
Pixlr: An online photo editor with features advanced—object and background replacement, AI upscaler. AI-powered filters and effects enliven the user’s toolkit with the new levels of creativity in working with images. The free version contains some basic tools with good filters, while the priced plans reserve the rest of the features.
Gravit Designer: This is an open-source, free vector graphics editor for more experienced designers. Some of its features include smart shapes, which fit shapes to exactly what you need, and then there are features like vector image tracing and path optimization, which help make designs faster and easier.
Vectr: A user-friendly vector graphics editor that is collaboratively built, featuring some lesser forms of AI functionalities like background removal and smart object detection. Though lacking many AI features that other tools boast, the free plan has basic vector design tools and features, including the ability to save in both SVG and PNG.
Crello: A free online design tool with a social media graphic bias. Some important features include the “Smart Resize” facility powered by AI to adapt your work to the formats required by different platforms. In this case, the design will be done with the right specifications for it to be used in social media. The downside is that there is limited design customization under the free plan.
Figma (Free Starter Plan): Inclusive design tool with the most basic AI-powered features like “Auto Layout” to help maintain consistency in your design. Prototyping and design collaboration tools on the free plan are very basic but apply limitations on the storage and the number of collaborators for a project.
Easil: This is the perfect web-based design platform to design marketing materials like flyers and posters. It comes with an AI-powered feature called “Resize Magic,” which can automatically resize your design to fit different formats in an instant. The free plan, however, has limited export options and design customization.
Design Wizard: Marketing visual tool; social media post and infographic creation, with AI in its “Photo Resize” feature, for quality image resizing. The free plans offer a few templates and images to use for free, with limited editing and exporting functions.
BeFunky is among the top contenders within the plethora of online photo editors, with free AI-based features like the Background Remover and Artistic Style Transfer. This allows for many new possibilities for creative AI-powered photo manipulations, effects, and filters. Basic editing tools in the free plan come packed with a small selection compared to their whole array of effects and filters, and hence, they are limited in controls, not giving their users a full experience in editing images and exporting.
