My favorite design resources for startups - 2019
Living on the age of Experiment Design, we need resources more than ever.
Graphic Design is not about (only) making things pretty, but it is about finding the best way to translate your message into visuals. It’s about connecting with the user, creating emotional links and selling ideas as if they were material, even when abstract.
Fast cheap and good seems like a miracle, but these resources come close:
- Unsplash
Forget about "Caucasian woman laughs and eats bowl of salad". Unsplash is here to kill your traditional stock pictures and steals first place as my favourite photo database. They are all tasteful, rich, beautiful images that are CC0, free for commercial use. If you are looking to inspire people, this is the one. If you are looking for more “literal†pictures, you may try…
- FlatIcon
This insanely good website has icons for everything you may ask in multiple styles. They also bundle them per “family†so if you are a health or a data company, you can just find your bundle right there. It’s for free with attribution OR only €10/m for full commercial use. Seriously? Yes. They also have an app where you can drag icons straight into keynote or even…
- Google Slides
This free slides platform may fool you. The look is not as fresh as keynote and the dazzling animations are not there quite yet. But google slides comes with strength and ready to kill all other platforms: Features include creating slides simultaneously with your peers, editing them online in multiple platforms & converting to a lot of formats (it works well from and also to PowerPoint). Golden tip: they have BRILLIANT templates, one of them is the perfect startup pitch as designed by Google Ventures. Can it get any better? Yes: full support of all fonts available on google fonts which is the biggest database of free for commercial use fonts. No more problems with outdated slides on the wrong hands or font issues.
- Instapage
This one is not free (actually it's quite pricey at €99/month) but with this tool you can create hundreds of landing pages with little-to-no effort. With simple templates that make any small idea look like a million-dollar startup, duplication and A/B testing features that will save you literal hours, Instapage stole my heart from the first time I used it.
- Divi
Saved the best for last. Divi may seem expensive for some but I tell you: it isn’t. It’s $89 a year and you get a FULL website builder inside of our old friend Wordpress. And I don’t mean a kinda-ok-it-sorta-works — I mean this builder makes squarespace and wix give a good run for their money. Zero coding is necessary and you can set up basically anything from scratch or using their templates.
Easy to access, easy to install and easy to use. What are you waiting for?
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To be clear, I get zero cash from this post. This is literally just friendly advice from years of experience designing and looking for resources all across this beautiful world-wide-web.
And as always: Do you want that apple-startup-premium-cool look? You need a designer! But in case you can’t get one, these resources are good to go.
Do you like it? Share it with a startup in need! Do you have a resource of your own? Share it with me!
Let's make the world beautiful again! ;)