Simple free tools to make your organization look more professional
Presenting a professional and consistent image and messaging to your clients and other stakeholders doesn’t have to be complicated, or costly.
Here is a curated list of some of the best free tools you should be using!
Canva
Canva (affiliate link) is one of the best, easiest to use tools to create visual assets online. Anything from flyers, to social media share graphics, even business cards, presentations, annual reports and other documents can easily be designed on the tool, using professional templates as a starting point, so can get great design ideas and you never need to start from scratch.
Canva’s free account gives you quite a lot, but if you’d like to unlock premium templates and content, consider sighing up for Canva Pro. The Pro account is perfect for organizations that want to take their designs to the next level. It’s also free to registered nonprofits!
Unsplash is one of the most popular websites for free stock photos. They have a large database of professional photos that can fit just about any use case.
Another great option for stock photos is Pexels. In addition to a large selection of free photos, Pexels also offers a fairly large database of free videos.
Slidesgo is my favorite presentation templates tool. Nearly all the presentations I do now start with a Slidesgo template. You can scroll through a large number of free templates in several categories. To get access to the premium templates, consider signing up for their premium account, but even with the free account you will have quite a few options. You can browse their template database by category and you can also look for presentations by color and style!
Storyset is an online tool with a great selection of free illustrations you can use for your project. You can add these illustrations to your website, presentations, and any type of documents, to make them more engaging and professional. They offer five different styles of illustrations, and before downloading one, you can choose to add/remove certain elements of the illustration and even change the colors. I would suggest that you use illustrations of the same type throughout your document to ensure visual consistency.
Flaticon is a tool that gives you access to a large database of icons and stickers. When you do a search for the icon you are looking for, you can further filter by shape and color, so you can get exactly what you need. Flaticon even has an add-on for Google Slides and Google Docs, so you can more easily get access to free icons as you work on your documents.
Templates from Google or Microsoft
Finally, both Google and Microsoft offer a number of templates for documents you create using their platforms.
GooDocs - website for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides templates
I hope you find these free resources helpful. Let me know if I can assist you in any way as you make your projects more visually appealing and professional!
