At times when graphic designers are out of reach, designing for digital signage can be overwhelming for the non-designer.
But you don’t have to be a Photoshop expert to create beautiful images that get customers’ attention. With the various free tools and resources available online, it’s not impossible for marketers to create cool digital signage images on their own.
6 Free Tools for Designing Digital Signage
Before attempting to create a cool digital signage image, you’ll want to pick a tool and take the time to familiarize yourself with it.
Here are a few exceptional options:
- Canva: A new tool for graphic design that aims to simplify the process, while also curating stunning layout designs. Industry Weapon shares some practical tips as to how to use this specific tool to create digital signage images. Additionally, Canva provides it’s free own resources for learning about graphic design on it’s Design School.
- PicMonkey: A free alternative to Photoshop that’s been around for awhile.
- Snappa: An alternative to Canva.
- Pablo: A tool that social media scheduling tool Buffer created to make it easy and simple to create images to share on social during fast-paced times (like events or Twitter chats). Adobe Spark is another tool specifically tailored for creating beautiful graphics for social media.
- Google Nik: Very similar to Photoshop, but at a much more appealing price – it’s recently been released as a software program that anyone can download for free!
Sometimes, free just isn’t going to cut it. Another excellent resource for graphic design talent is Fiverr. Starting at $5/order, you can bring your digital signage images to life with a professional who can bring your concept to reality.
Digital Signage Design Trends
Regardless of if you do-it-yourself or seek help, you need some understanding of what you want to achieve. So before diving directly into digital signage image creation, it can be helpful to understand current design trends influencing the industry.
Industry Weapon describes a few that are worth looking into and familiarizing yourself with:
- Hero images: Hero images are characterized by being simple, but powerful. If you have a lot of great images of your products or services, you should use them in your digital signage, as the main focus, with just a small amount of text.
- Minimalism: Minimalism is simple and direct. A minimalist design incorporates a lot of whitespace so that the most important points stand out. Use this principle with digital signage by centering the most important text.
- Bright colors: Bright colors are practically impossible to ignore. If you have a special that’s begging for attention, you may want to incorporate some bright colors in your digital signage to draw peoples’ eyes to it.
It can be helpful to create a swipe file of sorts for digital signage design trends that you like. Maintaining a swipe file means that inspiration is just a click away when you’re not feeling creative.
Creating a secret board on Pinterest or a folder on Evernote is a great way to organize ideas and inspiration.
Digital Signage Image Designing Basics
Once you’ve found a tool you love and are starting to understand, it’s time to finally attempt to design your digital signage image.
Here are some of the essential fundamental steps:
- Find high-quality stock images or shoot your own pictures. Pictures from a phone camera with high resolution are better than nothing if you don’t have a photographer on staff. Librestock is an excellent resource for legal-to-use stock images that aggregates search results from many of the top free stock image websites.
- Select typography that matches your brand’s existing theme, or something close to it. You’ll find that you’re somewhat limited by the font options available on the aforementioned free image editing tools.
- Select an appropriate color scheme complementary to your branding and be consistent across various digital signage images. Too many colors hurts eyes more than it draws attention.
Conclusion
It’s not hard to create beautiful digital signage images, you just need to understand the tools at your disposal, and different methods for creating.
So to create cool digital signage images effectively and easily:
- Leverage the free design tools available
- Learn and follow basic graphic design rules and best practices
- Find design inspiration from other brands you admire and save them in a swipe file
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