Design tools for founders are now a necessity, especially since finding designers who share the same design ideology as you is near impossible!
Being a founder means that you’re fulfilling numerous job descriptions simultaneously; at times you may feel like an octopus reaching out to do 8 tasks at the same time. This scenario will persist until you have the resources and capability to hire a team.
Design work can often be the most technical side-responsibility for a founder, especially if they have never tried their hand at it before. So if you’ve never designed posts, apps, websites, or even t-shirts or AR filters, here are some tools to help you get started:
1. Canva
Create CVs, cards, social media posts, stories, and a whole lot more in a matter of minutes. Canva offers its users a bottomless pit of premade layouts, templates, icons, and images for users to chop, change, and bend to fit their unique designs.
Create a design in minutes, save it in your preferred format, then upload, send, or share however you need to!
2. Unsplash and Pexels
Both these websites offer a wealth of high-quality stock images, some user-submitted, some curated. For those who need just that, these sources are invaluable.
Alongside, Unsplash and Pexels, you may be able to find other services offering free images; however, their vault may not be as big!
3. Blush (Co-Author’s Favorite Animation Tool)
Unique illustrations go a long way! You can help tell a truly NEW story by creating vibrant and thought-provoking illustrations through Blush. Blush allows you to use pre-built designs and edits to generate these kinds of illustrations.
4. Lottie
Animations are super cool and can help you put your ideas into motion. Lottie is your one-stop-shop for all things animations as you can access free ones, buy premium ones, or even hire animators to provide tailor-made ones!
5. Flaticon
Flaticon has a massive collection of vector icons that can be used to beef up presentations, apps, etc. Users are spoilt for choice! They can choose form regular icons, interface icons, animated icons, stickers, and even logos, which is a new addition!
Flaticon is definitely one of the most important design tools for founders!
6. Tailor Brands
As it says in its name, Tailor Brands will literally help you tailor-make merchandise, an online presence, and a lot more, simply by asking you a couple of easy-to-answer questions.
Tailor Brands will provide you with a logo and brand guide in a few minutes, even if all you have is a rough idea.
7. Hatchful
Usually figuring as part of Shopify’s wealth of tool offerings, Hatchful does one thing and does it really well: create professional logos in mere seconds.
The process begins with the user selecting a category, then a visual style, adding their business’ name and slogan. This results in a collection of potential design skeletons that can then be customized to user preference.
8. Figma
They say “Nothing Great is Made Alone”; by they, we mean Figma themselves. It’s plastered on their homepage, and it explains Figma perfectly well. Figma lets everyone working on a design collaborate on it mid-completion.
Additionally, we think that one of its key features is ‘prototyping’, the process of testing your design in various steps of the process. Let us explain further: you can emulate the real in-use experience of your design while designing it.
You can choose interactions and animations, define what happens on a hover, a click, or a right-click, and see how the mobile experience weighs up, among other things.
P.s: The Katalyst Labs’ Acceleration Program’s cohort 3 has also gone through all-encompassing Figma-learning sessions!
9. Adobe Express (formerly Adobe Spark)
Another design tool for beginners, Adobe Express can be useful for various professionals creating content for a wide variety of use-cases.
Need to make a visually appealing and high-converting Instagram story, or collaborate with others to design a Facebook post? Adobe Express has it all! It will allow you to animate text, add your own branding, displace backgrounds, and so much more!
The platform offers a deep pool of diverse and ready-made templates, logos, and assets for social media content. Moreover, Adobe is a big name in the design game, making thier ‘express’ offering one of the integral design tools for founders.
10. UpLabs
You’ve heard of Fiverr and Upwork, but have you heard of UpLabs? This is a resource-locating platform specifically made for designers.
It calls itself a “website for designers and developers to find and share resources to build apps and sites”. You can find several freelancing design professionals on the platform selling their services or premade designs.
Additionally, UpLabs also does cool competitions to allow users to compete, learn how to design, gain attention from potential clients, and win exciting prizes!
This list was co-authored by and curated with inspiration taken from, Muhammad Mubashir. Do people still want to work in Pakistani startups? Find out here. Want to know more about the prospect of AI taking over our jobs? Read this!
