The next time you scroll through your feed on social media, notice how only specific kinds of posts will stand out enough for you to stop and look at it. Everyday, businesses are competing against thousands of other businesses for the attention of their followers on social media platforms. What this means for you as a business owner, is that aside from generating social media posts that are strong in terms of the content it conveys, creating ones that are visually appealing is equally as important. 

If you’re a solopreneur thinking to yourself, ‘there’s no way I can create artwork to compete with all the professionally designed visuals on social media’, you’re in luck because that changes today.

In this article, we’re sharing with you 5 useful design tools and resources that’ll make creating outstanding social media visuals achievable for everyone! 

Canva is an online design and publishing tool that provides you with a plethora of beautifully designed templates and easy-to-use features to help you create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content like a pro. 

The basic use of the platform is free and gives you access to plenty of tools and resources including 250,000+ templates as well as hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics to work with. For some of you, this’ll be enough to create some great visual content for your social media, however, to take it up a notch, there’s a pro subscription starting from just S$17.98/month that enables you to do so much more, like create a brand kit to ensure your visuals look consistent with your brand, access over 75 million premium stock photos, videos, audios and graphics, and so much more! 

2. Creative Market

Creative Market is an online marketplace for community-generated design assets. On the marketplace, you’ll find over 4 million quality resources and design assets available for purchase such as graphics, WordPress themes, stock photography and even more unique canva templates created by artists in over 190 countries around the world! 

There’s so much to explore on Creative Market, but for a start, check out their Social Media Templates page where you'll find over 10,000 pre-designed templates including graphics and themes for a cohesive and aesthetic feed. 

3. The Noun Project 

Infographics are a powerful visual format to distill and simplify broad and complex ideas. For viewers, rather than having to sift through copious amounts of information, they can capture important data, stats and highlights in a single creative and engaging infographic - making them a popular visual form for social media posts. 

Icons are a great visual element to incorporate into infographic posts (or even posts of other visual formats). The Noun Project is a resource that provides you with tonnes of free icons to choose from. 

4. Unsplash

If you don’t already have an archive of photos that you can tap into for your visual creations, your next best bet are stock images.

Several websites out there require you to pay for high-quality stock images, and on this front, Unsplash is a game changer. They only accept the finest quality image, so you can be rest assured that when you download free stock images from their website, you’re not sacrificing quality.  

If you can’t find a suitable image on Unsplash, Pexels is another resource to make use of. In addition to the stunning stock photos available for free on Pexels, on the platform, you’ll also find lots of great video clips shot and shared by talented creators around the globe as well. With Pexels, you’re no longer limited to static images or artwork in your designs. 

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