Graphic design comes in all shapes and sizes, whether it’s an interesting logo, great commercial, great cover art from your favourite band’s album or any similar stuff. It’s true that you need to have a great knowledge and sense of art and beauty to be a great graphic designer, and if you are interested in becoming one, there are tons of great graphic design software for PC, that you can use. So, if you are an advanced graphic designer or just a beginner who is interested in such thing, I suggest that you check out our list of top 10 best graphic design software for PC.
1. Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is basically the king of all graphic design software. It has unlimited options for editing your photos, allowing you to do things like cropping, resizing, inserting objects into the picture, removing the certain objects from your picture, adding filters and much more. It’s also the best tool for professional photographers, as it supports various image formats like JPG, JPEG and even RAW, which is an uncompressed image format. Graphic designers can now create professional photos by removing blemishes from the photos, thus making them crystal clear. However, Photoshop isn’t a free software, so you’ll have to pay the price for those features.
2. CorelDRAW
CorelDRAW takes a different approach to graphic design, by introducing vector graphics editor. Vector graphics are sort of images, which you can resize and still keep the quality. Cool, right? Well, CorelDRAW lets you do stuff like Attract, Smear, Twirl and much more, making it easy and fun to edit vector graphics. Although CorelDRAW is very simple to use for the most time, it can sometimes be very complex for some advanced operations, making it a little unfriendly for the newbies. Thankfully, there are tons of tutorial videos on the internet, to help you solve this issue.
3. GIMP
GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and it’s an image editor, as its name says. If you don’t like Phosotshop for some reason, this is a perfect alternative. It’s like a simplified version of Photoshop that you can manipulate with, in every sense. For example, there are tons of options for editor and creators, like cropping, resizing, etc, as well as completely customizable interface, that you can tail to your needs. GIMP is not only great for professional graphic designers, but for beginners willing to learn more about graphic design.
4. Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator also works with vector graphics, but it’s more oriented towards creating logos, sketches and other complex animations, great for videos, game creation and such. Its interface is similar to Photoshop and it offers a really good set of tools for creators and graphic designers. It’s amazing how good this software works and it isn’t that complex, but still, manages to bring some of the best features in this type of apps. As with any Adobe product, Illustrator also isn’t free. Not only that, but I would say that it’s a little expensive, so pick this up if you really want to take your graphics designing to a new level.
5. Inkscape
If Illustrator is too expensive for you, and you want a little more simple app for SVG editing, then Inkscape is for you. Inkscape is also free, which is great! It offers the similar features like its more advanced friend Illustrator, by letting users edit or create SVG files in this app. Vector images can now be created easily for your videos, website or blog, as Inkscape offers a feature to directly edit the source code, which is really cool. Having in mind that it’s free, there is not a reason not to try it!
6. Google Developers
Google Developers is a great web application that will allow you to create a chart that you can insert into your web page. Yes, it’s that simple, but it’s also free and works flawlessly for this matter. You can now easily create charts and graphs that you can insert into your document or web page, or simply save it to your PC and use it for another purpose. I’ve used it a couple of times, and it’s very cool.
7. SVG Edit
SVG Edit is a great online SVG editor, used for editing vector graphics. Of course, it’s free and it’s offered by Google for a simple 2D SVG editing. While the 3D is much more complex than 2D, you can still do great stuff with this editor, like editing sketches for your website, blog or any other document, as well as edit directly from the source code if you download it. It’s simple, it’s free and works really well; that’s all I need for a perfect SVG editor.
8. Adobe Indesign
Adobe Indesign is a great software for designing layouts for online books, brochures or magazines. I like it because it’s very simple to use and works with a simple drag & drop feature, where you can drag and drop the layers and resize them very easily. If you use Adobe Sync, it’s even better, as you can sync your work with the other apps and devices that you use.
9. Infogr.am
Infogr.am is a free software, great for creating graphs and charts. It’s an online service, so you can use it from your browser on PC. Aside from creating charts and graphs, there is a great feature that allows for simple picture and video uploading, similar to social platforms. The files you create here can be shared as a link or saved to a page directly, so it’s a full-fledged online graphic design software.
10. Corel PaintShop
Corel PaintShop is a great tool for editing photos, but can also be used for designers. It’s more oriented towards newbies to graphic designing, although professionals can have a little benefit from this software. PaintShop supports a wide variety of image formats including RAW and TIFF, and there is an option for Auto Edit, which works really well. If you don’t want the app to do the auto-editing for you, there are almost hundred creative filters that you can apply to your photos and create your own, unique work.