Last Updated on June 21, 2023
The numbers don’t lie: people love visuals.
On Facebook, posts with images get 2.3x more engagement than those without, and Tweets with pictures receive 150% more retweets.
Adding images to your social media posts is easy. The difficult part is creating beautiful visuals that stop people in their tracks as they’re aimlessly scrolling through their feeds. Standing out is key on social media, and eye-catching graphics go a long way in helping with that.
But for those without an eye for design, it can be hard putting together something that looks good. Luckily, there are plenty of tools available to help that give you access to professional-quality design assets and allow you to customize colors and fonts to match your brand.
Without further ado, we’ve rounded up some of the best to get you started.
1. Canva
Canva comes equipped with thousands of pre-made templates for every occasion, whether you’re looking to put together an infographic to annotate your latest research or an Instagram story template to show off your new product.
The drag and drop editor makes it super simple to create stunning visuals, and you can change the colors to match your brand. As well as a range of templates, there are also a ton of illustrations, fonts, and photos to use for your social images.
Simply choose a relevant template for the kind of social media image you want to create, and then play around with the designs. You don’t have to choose a premade template either, you can start from scratch and build up your own design.
2. Adobe Spark
Like Canva, Adobe Spark has hundreds of premade templates you can use as a starting point. Choose from a range of different social media graphic sizes, including Instagram posts, Instagram Stories, Facebook, and Twitter.
Once you select the style you like, you can customize it with your brand colors and add in extra illustrations and text. The great thing about Adobe Spark is you can resize your design for all different types of social media so you don’t have to create it from scratch every time. Instead, the tool automatically resizes everything so it still looks good.
3. Placeit
Have you ever come across a post where a brand has displayed their product on a computer, tablet, or phone in a beautiful flat lay design and wondered why you can’t do something similar?
You’re not alone. However, a tool like Placeit makes it easy to add your branding to images.
You can add your logo, branding, or a chosen image to everything from an iPad or an iPhone to t-shirts, mugs, pillows, and packaging. Doing this will help make your social feeds cohesive and make your brand recognizable to new and existing followers.
4. Pablo
Social media scheduling tool Buffer recently released their social graphic design tool, Pablo. You can choose the dimensions of your images depending on the platform you want to post them on, and you can browse thousands of images to find the perfect backdrop.
Once you’ve selected your template, you can play around with the fonts and text until you get it looking like you want it to.
Pablo can seem fairly limited compared to the other options here, but it’s a really quick way to make simple, stand out social media graphics in no time at all.
5. Creative Market
Finding images and inspiration is often the hardest part of creating beautiful social media images. You’re exposed to thousands of posts a day, and finding the right fit for your brand can seem tricky.
Creative Market is an online marketplace where users can download and buy design assets, like packs of illustrations, different fonts, and photographs.
Each week, the platform sends out a selection of free assets that you can download and start using on your social media graphics straight away. This option is perfect if you’re looking for inspiration and want to have access to several different styles that still are in keeping with your brand.
As well as the free downloads, Creative Market has packs of graphics for around $2, making it a really cheap way to get access to professional design assets.
Start Designing Beautiful Social Media Graphics
These tools take the pain out of designing beautiful, eye-catching social media graphics that will make your posts stand out in your followers’ feeds. Designing something that looks good doesn’t have to be a headache, and it certainly doesn’t have to take a ton of time and all your resources.
Instead, these tools let you get your hands on professional-quality images, illustrations, and templates, and allow you to customize them to suit your individual brand needs. If you haven’t already started using images on social media, now’s the time to do so.
