You’re not alone. No one can deny the role of captivating imagery in grabbing attention and getting your message across to an audience, especially as a business owner.
However, hiring a professional designer can be costly, and using complex design software can be intimidating, if not a waste of your time.
AI to the Rescue
What can you do then? You may be familiar with AI for writing, but AI has also changed the design game, and there are now many powerful yet affordable solutions that allow you to create stunning graphic designs with just a few clicks or simple prompts.
In this article, we explore the 7 best AI design tools that you can use without breaking the bank.
1. Microsoft Designer
Designer is a completely free tool for creating images, stickers, and designs by simply entering a prompt. It integrates DALL•E and GPT 3.5 to enable users to get started with AI design, with additional image editing features, including the ability to remove the background of images.
Whether you are a creative looking for ideas or a content marketer trying to create an entire brand kit, Designer is suitable for handling various tasks.
While refining your designs, you also get suggestions and ideas, such as adding motion effects to make your design more compelling.
Though still marked as ‘Preview,’ it is a fully featured web app, with early beta versions of mobile apps already released.
2. Canva Magic Design
Canva has established itself as a household name in the design world. To make it even easier for users to create designs, it jumped on the Generative AI trend by launching affordable AI design tools, especially Magic Design.
It’s an AI image generator that enables you to create images with various style options, including Filmic, Colour Pencil, Neon, Watercolour, and so on.
It also includes Magic Edit and Magic Eraser, which help you refine your designs in a moment using a text prompt.
Designers targeting multilingual audiences will love the fact that they can automatically translate their design copy into over 100 languages. Canva is free, as always, and access to Magic Design is free, too.
On a free subscription, users can generate up to 50 images using AI. A Canva Pro subscription increases the limit to 500 per month.
3. Adobe Firefly
When you generate images from text using Firefly, you can also guide the style of the result by selecting reference images. And that’s not all. Firefly also allows users to remove objects or add new ones (Generative Fill), add text effects, and even recolor designs, all using AI.
More so, designers can use it to generate editable templates and vector graphics, all from simple text prompts, for your overall visual content strategy. Firefly is available as a standalone web app via firefly.adobe.com.
It is also integrated into Adobe’s other apps, such as Photoshop and Illustrator. So, if you or your organization uses any of these, it’s very likely that you’re already enjoying the benefits of AI design with Adobe.
You can get started with Firefly for free with access to 25 generative credits or get 100 credits monthly for $4.99.
4. Designs.ai
Designs.ai is one of the most full-featured and affordable AI design tools available online. Within a few moments, users can generate images, logos, posters, mockups, and even videos with access to AI-powered editing features.
There are over 20,000 templates to choose from to make your designs and over 10,000 icons for logo generation ideas.
In short, you can create a full brand identity kit using Designs.ai, including style guidelines and brand narrative; it is excellent software for entrepreneurs launching a new business.
The full AI generation wizard is available for free to all users via its web app, but for $19, you get access to advanced features, including more AI capabilities.
5. Fotor
Fotor is one of the most versatile and affordable AI design tools for generating logos, graphics, posters, and avatars. It also allows you to create interior design, product design, and even architectural models, all with the power of AI.
Like others, it works by taking a text prompt and transforming it into a catchy graphic design or whatever kind of design you want.
Suppose you need a logo for your business. In that case, Fotor will create it for you and even generate mockups for incorporating the logo into various products, business cards, souvenirs, packaging material, and more.
The basic features are free, but the Fotor Pro is relatively inexpensive, too; it starts at $3.33 monthly.
6. Uizard
Imagine that you could create the entire UI design for your website or app using AI. With Uizard, there’s no need to imagine. All you need to get started is to take screenshots of desired apps, and the software will transform them into editable mockups with speed.
Even more exciting is that it can generate UI designs from hand-drawn wireframes. Uizard’s Autodesigner is built to handle all these and more.
It’s suitable for product designers, entrepreneurs, and creatives who need to design landing pages, mobile apps, website prototypes, and so on, all with text prompts.
Also, Uizard is a team-based app, so it allows for seamless collaboration and sharing.
7. Khroma
If you have ever created graphics designs or tried your hands on anything visual arts, then you must know what important role color plays. You must also know that it takes work to choose the right color for your needs.
One of the most affordable AI design tools for colors is Khroma. How does it come in?
Khroma is a web app that uses AI to learn your favorite colors and then create unlimited palettes of colors to bring all your ideas to life. To use Khroma, it’ll ask you to select 50 different colors, which it’ll then use to train the neural network model.
What you get in return is an endless array of colors and palettes to work with. Khroma is free of charge, and everything works on your browser. It saves your personalized results in your local storage, and you can export them if you wish.
Conclusion
Design is not limited to professionals with years of experience anymore. Don’t let a lack of access to a professional designer or design tool limit your creativity and ideas for your business.
These affordable AI design tools will help you unleash your creative visions as an entrepreneur.
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