In our last installment in our series on marketing tools, I went over some blackhat SEO tools. In this installment, I’m going to cover a rather broad area…graphic design tools.
Let’s be honest, text is boring. The things that make sales pages and web sites sparkle is graphic design. And let me tell you, graphic design is an art. How do I know? Because I am NO graphic designer. Oh, I have the tools because I like to dabble, but I am no pro. I just do enough to get a site looking decent.
Well, it wasn’t until I started doing some of my own design that I discovered how many design tools there are in the world. There may be more design tools than just about anything else I can think of.
One of the most popular design tools is Adobe Photoshop. If you go to the Clickbank marketplace, you will find products that sell scripts primarily to work with Photoshop. That is how big Photoshop is. It also comes with a hefty price tag. The current CS3 version is about $700. Let me tell you, it is worth every penny.
But graphic design tools don’t just begin and end with Photoshop. As I said, there are action scripts designed to work with Photoshop. But scripts are no good without actual designs to act on. And if you’re not a real graphic designer, don’t fret. See, we have sites like Istockphoto where you can get stock photos for just about any need. Just go through the categories and pick out the photos you need.
What if you need some comical clipart? Not a problem…there is openclipart.org. This site has just about everything that you could possibly want in clipart. And if you can’t find it there, don’t worry. There are hundreds of clipart sites on the Internet…many are free.
But hold the phone. All of this stuff doesn’t do us any good unless we have a web site to put it on. And what if you’re not exactly an expert HTML coder? Again, this is not a problem. There are HTML editors galore on the Internet. Many of them are free. Of course if you don’t like the free ones, you can go with something like Front Page or Dreamweaver. Of course if you go with Dreamweaver, you might also want to go with Flash as well.
What about after you get your web site up and you want people to have a special icon to look at in their web browser favorites? Not a problem here either. There are favicon generators that will do this for you.
The above tools only scratch the surface of graphic and web design. What amazes me is that so many of these tools are free. Yes, you can get upgraded versions of them that are more powerful, but if you just need to do the basics, you can do that at very little or no cost.
Graphic design is a huge business and the tools that we use for that design is probably an even bigger business.
I’m still stinging from my $700 Photoshop purchase.
