Many of them use the same fonts and can get sorta boring. If you want to create a truly memorable graphic, it starts with using a beautiful font. Doing just this will take your image from good to great. It might seem subtle, but using just the right font will create a unique feel that will make your image stand out from the rest.

Even better, if you can use rare, more obscure fonts, it will give your image a totally custom feel. Here’s a list of some of the best and lesser-known premium fonts you can use in your designs today:

Buckle up Buttercup Marker Font

This amazing font from Maryam Kamal Co is one of the best hand-drawn fonts around. It’s also available in SVG, which is a nice bonus. It’s designed to look as close as possible to natural handwriting by keeping the subtle imperfections on the edges. It’s perfect for many uses such as magazine headlines, high fashion, bold signature branding, classy packaging, eye-catching callouts and stand-out advertising.

Get the font →

The Succulent (Font Trio)

This great font from Andrea De Oliveira is earthy and stylish, but can be used in a variety of situations: wedding invites, social media, scrapbooks, overlays for photos and more. One nice thing is this is actually a set of 3 separate fonts for the price of one. All three work really well together and can be paired for nearly endless possibilities.

Get the font →

Hackney

Hackney is a beautiful font (also available in SVG) from Ellen Luff that really packs a punch. It is an all caps font, with two alternatives for every letter, to maintain the custom made look, without obvious doubles. It includes ALL European language support as well. It’s designed to be an incredibly accessible hand-painted font. It includes three versions of the font to suit nearly any situation.

Get the font →

Sunkissed

Another absolute stunner from Maryam Kamal Co, Sunkissed is an instant classic. It’s also pretty rare to see such a beautiful and unique all-caps font, with a watercolor feel.

This trendy font collection includes an SVG and a regular font file. This font is actually 2 fonts in 1, and they can be matched for all sorts of uses. The realistic watercolor and texture of the fonts add extra originality and character other regular fonts can’t offer. The stylish textured script was designed to complement the watercolor sans font, but it also looks amazing on its own. Don’t sleep on this one!

Get the font →

Avallon

This font from Sam Parrett is great because it includes a newer “OpenType-SVG or Colour fonts” format in addition to the regular TTF format. If you’re going to be using it in Stencil, be sure to upload the TTF only. If you’re using the font outside of Stencil, using the new OpenType-SVG format allows for more detail to the letters than previously possible. This font has an amazing paintbrush effect built-in, as a transparent texture, which just gives it a completely unique look.

Get the font →

Freeday Script & Sans

Freeday Font from Aktab Studio is a modern font suitable for greeting cards, social media posts, blog images or even logo design. It comes with a complete set of standard characters, Alternates, Ligature Variation, Punctuation & has an extra textured version if you’re looking for that more distressed look. Its curves are extremely pleasing to the eye and will keep your audience wanting to see more!

Get the font →

There’s such a wide selection of fonts available now, that we wanted to keep this list short, curated and concise. Be sure to check these out and think about how you’ll be using them to wow your audience!

The post 6 Rare Hand-Drawn Fonts To Use In Your Next Design appeared first on Stencil.

Non-Designer Graphic Design Tools for Marketing

First, let’s just say there are several graphic design tools who love to copycat other tools. We’ve avoided those and went straight to the original graphic design tools that made a distinct mark on their craft. Graphic design tools are used for a variety of needs: infographics, social media graphics, GIFs, mobile graphic design apps, photo editing, and more.

Infographics

Infographics are an incredible social media design type to provide images with information to increase traffic to your website and it allows an audience to recall information better. It only takes us 150ms for a symbol to be processed and 100ms to attach a meaning to it. Although we can understand the visuals we see extremely fast, it’s easy to recall 80% of what we see too. Humans are visually wired!

There are two simple tools to create infographics for non-designers (no design experience necessary):

Piktochart

Piktochart helps create data visualizations with interactive charts and maps. The templates are beautiful and they have thousands of icons and images that you can use on your infographic. They do have a free trial and reasonably priced paid plans.

Visme

Visme is super easy to use to create engaging infographics. It has fantastic charts and maps for visualizing data. You can insert video, audio or embed polls into the infographic for an interactive experience. The fascinating feature of Visme is the analytics and tracking. You can create 5 projects a month for free. If you need more you can upgrade.

Mobile Graphic Design Apps

Over

Over is a mobile app for iOS device users (they’re working on Android) to create beautiful graphics. They have 10,000+ amazing templates, graphics, and fonts. It’s free with in-app purchases.

PicCollage

PicCollage is a fun and easy mobile app for graphic design. It can be used for Android, iPhone and more. There are more than 1,500 stickers and 80+ backgrounds to choose from to design an image. They also have templates you can work with to create collages and other designs. It’s free to use.

Photo Editors

Clipping Magic

If you have a product business, this tool may come in handy! Clipping Magic removes an unwanted background. If you plan to display a product but you need a clean white background you can use this tool quite easily. Just mark the object you want with green marking and what you don’t want with red markings. It’s simple and inexpensive.

LunaPic

LunaPic is a photo editing tool with a variety of features, however, the most notable is the transparent option. If you need to create an image with a transparent background this tool makes it super easy. It’s free to use.

PicMonkey

PicMonkey is an awesome photo editing tool! You can create photo effects, remove blemishes, teeth whitening, photo textures, collages, and much more. It’s a robust tool and no need to sign in. Just pop your photo in and start editing as needed. They say their easy tools make you the Michelangelo of photo editing. That’s pretty much true! PicMonkey has lots of great features to explore. It’s free but an upgrade may be needed for certain features.

Presentations

Canva

Many people don’t realize that you can create a presentation slide deck with Canva. They have an amazing selection of layouts to choose from with many of them with multiple pages. You can select a presentation theme by color and change out the photos or fonts. You can use their presentation mode as well and there’s no need to convert it into a PowerPoint. It’s free, however, there are some elements that are $1 each.

Google Slides

You can’t go wrong with using Google Slides! Super simple to use and you can work collaboratively with a team in real-time. You can open and edit or save PowerPoint files. There are templates for easy slide creation. It’s free to use.

Social Media / Blog / Marketing Graphics  

Stencil

Ok… just a bit biased here but Stencil needs a place on this list because it’s the fastest way to create social media graphics. It provides 1.8 Million photos to choose from and you can upload your own. Stencil has instant resizing for social media platforms and if you don’t see a size that you need customization can be done with a click. You can share directly to social media (send SMS with Instagram) or queue into Buffer to schedule for later. There are 1 Million+ icons that you can use for your images. The quote library is a unique feature so you’re not searching throughout the web for quotes BUT if you need to all you need is their Stencil extension to select the quote! Then the color eyedropper feature is amazing too. Can you tell I love Stencil?!

By the way, it’s free to use up to 10 images a month or if you need more you can upgrade.

Giphy

GIFs can be fun and can show off some personality. People love seeing the human side of a brand. You can create a GIF in Giphy with your own images or use their GIF collection. You can share directly to social media or embed the GIF to your blog. It’s free to use. Word of caution – use it sparingly or it can get annoying.

Some of these tools allow you to upload your own images or design elements so you can extend your creativity further with creating original images. We have some extra resources!

Extra Resources for Graphic Design

Fonts, design elements, photo mockups, illustrations, icons, and other design assets can help create desired effects to your graphic design. If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the tools above, you can download some terrific looking creations from these design sites:

Creative Market

Round Icons

Those Icons

Graphic Design Can Be Easy for Non-Designers

With all the tools out there, make it easy for yourself to create graphics by choosing the less complex tools with robust features. How are you using graphic design tools for marketing?

Let us know if you’re using any of these tools in the comments!

The post Non-Designer Graphic Design Tools & Resources for Marketing appeared first on Stencil.

Simple Graphic Design Tips for the Non-Designer

Background

First, let’s talk background. Now you’ve found an amazing photo and you really want to use it. The question is how? Sometimes a photo looks amazing but when you start working on the design it kind of doesn’t work out. No matter how you place the text or change the filter it still doesn’t look the way you want it.

When you look at the amazing photo, have an open mind. Know that the photo you’re looking at straight on will most likely change. Never go in thinking the photo is going to remain exactly the same and placing text on it will work perfectly. It rarely does.

Second, ask yourself if the photo is relatable and proper for your audience. Let’s face it. Sometimes we pick photos because they’re so gorgeous but don’t think of how followers or clients will relate to it. This tulip image is a perfect spring image. Perhaps you’re having a spring sale for your business, then this image may work. Let’s continue on and go through a couple of ways to work it out.

Transparency

Using the transparency feature in Stencil is just a click and slide away (as shown below).

When you have a busy image with no white space then transparency is your best bet in making the text stand out. You still see the tulips in the background and you’re now preparing the image for the message.

Let’s talk about the font for your message.

Fonts

Before you place your message onto the background, you have to choose your fonts. Only choose one to two fonts. When choosing fonts, make sure it’s appropriate to the design. Meaning, if it’s an image about a professional business, then using fonts like: Butterfly Kids, Chewy, Comic Sans MS, CODYSTAR, etc. are not appropriate.

Since the tulip image we’re using is for a spring sale, we’ll want to use a professional type so stay away from fancy script fonts and frilly fonts.

Stencil has an excellent font list however you can use Google Web Fonts directly through Stencil for more variety or upload your own font.

Good professional looking fonts will be clear and concise. You don’t have to stick with Arial, Times New Roman or Verdana. There are some excellent professional fonts such as: Hammersmith One, Helvetica, Montserrat, Open Sans, Oxygen, Quando, Quattrocento Sans, and Raleway. The key is to stick with one as your header or title and a second as your body font.

Combine fonts that are similar with the header preferably with more weight than the body font.

Here’s an example:

As you can see the spring sale text has a bit more weight or thicker than the body text. You can also use bold or an italic version of the same font to change the weight of the lettering.

It’s clear and concise in what the image wants to represent and has to offer.

Font Alignment

A good design always has proper alignment and the text should not be scattered throughout the image. Making the message legible and easy to read is the goal of the image. Stencil makes it easy to align the text with gridlines.

Note the colors of the text, let’s chat about that.

Font Color

I used a dark magenta color using the color spectrum in Stencil to match the darker tulips in the background. Simply move the dot within the box to get the color variant you’d like. Keep the colors similar. If I chose red for my header and green for the body then it wouldn’t look very professional.

Rather than use the color spectrum, you can find some great color palettes with HEX codes that can be entered into Stencil from these sites:

Color-Hex

Coolors

Text

Less text is best. Try to convey your message with minimal text. Your image should get people to stop and look rather than scroll through the social media stream. If the image has too much text it will not be read and will be passed on. Another way to use less text is to use icons.

White Space or Pattern Background

Talk about white space! This is an ideal photo that gives you a lot of space to work with for text. Any image that gives you open space with no objects in a section of the photo is white space. You can do a lot with this image.

As you can see I was able to use the white space quite easily.

People tend to be afraid of pattern backgrounds however they are very easy to work with. Most of the time you just need to adjust the font color or add the background color of the text.

Here are a couple of examples of different ways to use a pattern background:

Keep it simple with a contrasting color for text or a color background behind the text.

Color Overlays and Filters

Color overlays can be fun and can match your branding. Louise Myers does an excellent job in keeping within her brand with a purple overlay.

It’s a look that’s easy to maintain especially for blog post and social media images.

Filters can be great to provide a bit of texture or dimension to a photo.

What if you make a mistake?

Ok so we’ve gone through different ways of creating images but what if you make an error? Stencil has recently launched the Undo/Redo feature! It will create a history list of all your design moves. Pretty awesome, right?!

No need to worry about changing an image and wondering how to go back. You can create an image freely and know that it’s ok to make mistakes.

Let’s recap the design tips for the non-designer!

• Keep an open mind when designing. You never know where the design will go.
• Don’t be afraid to use busy backgrounds with the transparency feature.
• Choose 1-2 fonts that are relatable to the image.
• Combine fonts that are similar by using font variants.
• Keep your fonts in order! Align them easily with Stencil’s gridlines.
• Use font colors that correlate with the background image or provide a contrast of the background.
• Keep text short and sweet.
• Use icons rather than text when appropriate.
• Take advantage of white space and patterns.
• Color overlays and filters should be used with branding.
• Mistakes… what mistakes? The Undo/Redo feature is now available.

Which design tips for the non-designer listed have helped you with your image creation?

The post Simple Graphic Design Tips for the Non-Designer appeared first on Stencil.