While we love to help businesses with their marketing and branding assets, we know that it’s sometimes not possible mainly due to budget restrictions for small businesses. So this is a post about free design resources.

It’s important to realise that branding goes beyond creating pretty designs. The purpose is to create a recognisable brand through consistent use of your logo, brand colours, images, and messaging.

Consistancy through all of your graphic design pieces and materials will allow you to in essense “train” your customer to recognise your visual and communicative style, which will help you further differentiate yourself from competitors.

If you are really sure you have “zero budget” and aren’t ready to work with a design agency like us or hire in-house designers, you can still get pretty good results with do-it-yourself design resources available that enable you to create your own brand assets.

Take a look at these five free design applications you can use to lift the quality of your branding.

Business Cards

Business Cards are still one of the most effective promotional and networking tools in your marketing toolkit. Despite living in a digital world this traditional form of introducing yourself and your business to potential leads and partners still works. Exchanging physical business cards leaves more of an impression that quickly grabbing someone’s LinkedIn details during a tradeshow. Business Cards is a design application that enables you to design professional business cards in just a couple of minutes. Choose your industry, enter your contact details, job title, etc. and then customise your design and download in printable format.

Design Cap

Another powerful branding and sales tool are presentations. With the design tools available these days there’s no excuse to subject any customers or leads through a poorly designed slide deck. Your presentation should be attention grabbing, branded, visually pleasing and easy to read. Design Cap is a free presentation maker that allows you to come up with beautiful custom presentations. You’ll be able to fully customise any of their templates. Once you enter your content make sure you properly brand your slides. Add your logo, choose the core colour of your logo as accent pieces throughout the presentation and be consistent in your tone and use of other visual aids like images and icons. As you write your presentation keep the 7×7 rule in mind.

Stock Snap

One of your most powerful branding tools are images. Many entrepreneurs and even designers make the mistake of using photos randomly. Don’t simply choose a photo you like and incorporate it into your content. Think of images as one whole set. A free tool like Stock Snap will allow you to find high-resolution photos with commercial usage rights. Once you find an image in their database you like check if the photographer offers a whole set of images. These images will often have a similar style. That’s exactly what you want for your branding. Whether you are posting an image to your Instagram account, blog post or brochure keep going back to the same set of photos. This will give your brand a consistent and professional look.

Motionbox

Motionbox is a video editing platform used to collaborate on video content and share ideas in real-time. It’s intended to make creating social media videos more accessible to everyone. You can perform basic video editing tasks, like cutting, trimming, resizing, adding music, and animated text, and making your videos accessible to a global audience by automatically translating. Simply upload your file and then click a button.

Free Pik

Similar to images you can elevate the quality of your branding by using icons consistently. The first mistake many small business owners make is they simply use icons that are available through their word processing software or design tools. Your design is only as good as the quality of your icons. Don’t settle for cheap looking clipart. Use a resource like Free Pik to find and download professionally designed icons. Free Pik offers thousands of icons that you can use for personal and commercial projects, downloadable in PNG, SVG and EPS format. Take the same approach with icons as you do for images. Find an entire set and use that exclusively throughout your branding.

Biteable

With Facebook Live, Tik Tok, and other video based social media platforms your branding could probably also benefit from video based promotions. Hiring a film crew can be costly and might be overkill for your branding needs. Biteable is a free video maker that allows you to quickly customise professionally shot promotional video templates. The design process is straightforward, choose a template, add your content and branding. Once you are happy with your final cut you can post it instantly to YouTube, Instagram, website or anywhere else that’s suitable for video promotions.

Veed Video Editor

VEED is a simple and easy to use video editor. It has tools that are intuitive and make video editing tasks simple. You can cut, crop, rotate, add music, text and even generate subtitles automatically.It is designed for content creators, social publishers, dank memers and anyone who wants to get involved making video content.You can use Veed for free and without the need for an account.

Time to get creative

Now that you are equipped with branding resources it’s time to roll up your sleeves and give your brand assets a makeover. These will get you started. Click around our blog to learn more, and be sure to contact us if you want us to give your creations a free once over!