Challenge
- Solopreneurs and small business owners can’t afford professional designers when starting out.
Opportunity
- Use no-design tools to bootstrap your brand.
Get Started
- Understand that in the long run no-design tools cannot replace a professional graphic designer. You need both skill and experience to create credible brands.
- Learn enough of design basics to be dangerous and beat 95% of the competition.
- Build a basic set of visuals for your company:
Tools
- UnDraw, Scale, Open Doodles – Free-to-use illustrations.
- Flaticon, Icons8, freeicons – Free-to-use icons.
- UnSplash, StockSnap, Pixabay – Freely usable stock photos.
- Humaaans, blackillustrations, Blush, Open Peeps – Create illustrations of people with pre-made blocks.
- WeVideo, Typito, Wave.video – Video editors.
- AppMockUp, Screenshot Creator – Create screenshots for app stores.
- Crello, Canva – All-around tools: edit photos, design objects, animate or create video/audio.
- Visme – Presentations, infographics, charts.
- Zlides – Pre-designed slide decks.
- Mediamodifier – Product mockups.
- Remove Bg – Remove picture backgrounds automatically.
- Vector Creator – Vector graphics with library blocks.
- BannerBear – Automated media generation.
- Froala Design Blocks – Responsive design blocks built on Bootstrap.
Pros
- Save money when you don’t have inbound cash flow yet. Most listed tools are free to use or freemium.
- Save time and spin up quick designs for fast-paced content marketing: ads, blogs, newsletters, social media.
- Save effort: Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign are great tools but can have a steep learning curve.
Cons
- There is actual design involved. Even if you use pre-made libraries and blocks, you can’t escape from basic laws of design.
- Putting it together still requires work. Time investment is greater than 0. But the quality is probably a lot better than when a non-designer starts from scratch.
- Designs converge to similarity when everyone’s using the same basic blocks. Same happened with Bootstrap and web development.
Cases
- Signals – I created my basic visuals using Dorik, Bootstrap, Mediamodifier, Flaticon and draw.io.
- Hubstaff – 97% costs cut with DIY infographics by using Visme.
- American Airlines – Design workflow squeezed from 10 hours to 1 by using Canva.
- n8n – Used BannerBear to auto-create visuals for conference speaker submissions.
Forecast
- No-design tools are part of the bigger emerging creator economy trend. It’s easier than ever to get started. But more difficult than ever to stand out from the masses.
Resources
- NoDesign.dev – A collection of no-design tools for those with little to no artistic talent.
- How To Use DIY Graphics Like A Pro – This guide shows that over tweaking a design template is actually harmful.
- Is Design Mostly Dead? DIY Platforms vs. Hiring a Pro – Why you should probably use a professional for the important pieces.
Takeaways
- No-design tools can be a fast and a cost-efficient way to bootstrap a brand. In the long run, you should start using professionals at least to create the core items.
- Learn enough of design basics yourself to get the big things right.
- Expect some similarities with the visuals of other businesses if you use a lot of templates and pre-built blocks.