13 Free design Tools for Fresh and Starting up Designers

If you are someone who is a fresher and you are starting up as a career in design and you don't know what is the free materials available to start off with. You might be joining some programs, design schools, colleges, watching YouTube podcasts like this. So it means completely fine. But let me tell you what are the free materials available with you to get started. If you ask me very honestly, find an accountability partner who can really help you in this. This podcast is going to give you 13 different tools, there is no doubt about it. But highly, highly recommended. If you don't know where you are leading to how you can become a proper designer to professionally make a big good career out of it. Don't start with only tools. Start with a proper mentorship or an accountability partner or a very good education and the awareness about it. Then you work on this free tools. It's gonna really rock and roll you. Okay, so take this piece of advice because I've talked to more than 12,500 students and I've talked to different country designers and I have over 8.5 years of experience. Trust me guys, design works when you really have a proper accountability system to really work to become a proper designer. Because information is available all over the Internet and it's in fact overlooked. What people really lack in this particular creativity field is accountability and what exactly to do now and new next and do next and how you can create progress. Okay, so with this, let's jump into this podcast for this 13 different tools. Welcome guys to this Design for change. Thank you for staying tuning in with me. I'm going to be telling you 13 different free tools, guys. It's really useful for you. Please make sure you take a notes because each and every tool has a advanced feature as well as highly paid version as well as a free version. Okay? So do not take it in a wronger spelling. Take the spelling right so that you find the right tool to get your work done properly. Okay? The very first prominent tool I would say is Adobe xd, okay, which is a Adobe suit software. And you can use a free trial, I would say for start for just 30 days, okay? I mean higher version you can get it paid, but 30 days you can use and it is sufficient to really learn that particular tool. Okay? And Figma, Figma is also a free tool, but higher versions are costlier but you can use free tools. So Adobe XT 30 days is there. Figma is infinite. You can have a free time and if you want advanced feature you can pay for it. So it a very versatile tool. Particularly for ui, UX designers and product designers. Collaborative tool. It's good for prototyping. Free plan for most designers. Okay. Second is Miro. This is a beautiful tool guys. When you're building a research, when you're doing a whiteboard, like a platform where you collect information, you brainstorm, you mind map, you build some story narratives, you keep your entire design project in one space. Beautiful tool is Miro. Right now Miro has a very good AI enabled feature. It's completely free. Of course, advanced feature, has paid version, but that's not required. Now Trello is a third tool. Again, it's a very popular project management tool that can help designers really organize their task. They can create their board for design projects, collaborate with teams. So if you're becoming a professional designer, if you're starting up as a freelancer, if you're working in a small design studio or even in a big design studio, these are all the tools which you can use for free of cost. Fourth important tool is Asana. It is a beautiful tool. In fact, starting from small scale to big enterprises use this. It's a project management tool. It's a task tracking tool mainly for design project planning. Like let's say when the ideation will happen, when the prototyping stage should happen, when does the preliminary research should complete. So I tell you guys, when you move along in design project approaching and managing is more difficult than creating more ideas. You will feel hundred times better to do a creative session rather than working on planning and committing with your client or your customer to work. That's why tools like Asana, Trello, these will really help you in a larger sense. Trust me, I've worked in very intensive time crushing projects where the customer will come and sit at your neck. So for that you need a very clear timeline. And if you are managing 10 or 12 people in your team, you need a task assignation for each and every people who is doing what task and how they can track and when their timeline is completed and cumulatively how we can submit the final work. Okay, yes. The fifth important tool is balsamiq B A L S A M I Q. So this is a wireframing tool. It's a free trial tool is available guys. A free trial is available. It's used for creating low fidelity wireframes and sketches. It's a beautiful tool. You can try some industries use it, not all the industries. Okay, and the next is Marvel. See guys, Marvel offers you a very good free plan. You can test your interactive prototypes. It's a valuable tool for Particularly UI UX designers. I've used this tool. It's a very cool tool, guys. You can take a picture in your low fidelity sketches also and you can install this Marvel and you can try interacting with one or two screens. You can see how the interaction really happens. It's a very fun tool. Of course you can do it in Adobe XD and Figma. But still Marvel offers a even more flexible way and mobile version is also available. You can try for testing. Of course Adobe XD Figma also has a mobile version to test your interactive prototypes. But still this has its own purpose. The seventh important element is Google Workspace. I definitely need to tell you because Google offers damp free collaboration tools, guys. Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Word, Google Pages. So people don't really value that much. This is a beautiful Google workspace. You can try. You can use cloud storage. 15GB is available and you can use as much as possible Google Forms you want. It's unlimited. So a lot of features are there in the Google workspace. It's free of cost for documentation, collaboration, creative works. Next is GitHub. This is a beautiful tool guys. If you work on some developers, if you work with some programmers, this will help you manage your design files. It can track your changes, version wise changes. And you can have version 2, version 2.1. When does the change happen and before 10am what are the change you did? So this works pretty much in a very collaborative environment, particularly with designers. So and developers. Okay. The ninth important tool is User Flow. This is a very good tool for creating user flow diagramming, guys. See guys, you can create in Miro also absolutely no problem. There are templates available, but user flow is something very extensively available for creating user centric flow diagrams and creating more empathy mapping and journey mapping and user journey for your customer of their product and service. It's a lot of visual templates and representation techniques are available. That's the advantage. You can drag and drop and finally you will bring everything to your portfolio only. But make sure that. Okay, the tenth important tool is Canva. It's a beautiful tool, guys. Every non designers can use it. It's a free and of course higher versions are costly. But right now Canva has a AI enabled feature. It helps you in typing, it helps you in finding color schemes, it helps you in finding graphics. Lacks of templates is there. If you're making posters, graphics presentation, website, ppts magically you can make in few minutes, guys. It's a very good tool. Eleventh is whimsical. It's a free tool. It's for creating workflows like flowcharts, like wireframes, like the flow. What mean is flow? So the moment if you have this flow diagrams created. I mean it's really useful when you are showing it to your customer. Of course you can do it in Adobe XT Figma, but this is an exclusive tool. The 12th is Lucidchart. Lucidchart provides you a very good diagrammatic and visual communication way. What you can do is you can beautify your work of showcasing your journey mappings and all this will help you largely and it has a very good free plan also. And in fact in my one of the podcasts I've suggested you six different AI tools like LucidChart is also one such tool. You can. You can try out to create your wireframing and techniques. The last but not the least is Draw IO. It's a very good online diagramming tool. Guys. If you're really bad in Illustrator, particularly Illustrator is costly also you can create flowcharts and wireframes and diagram using this. You can do a free drawing. Of course free drawing can be done in Microsoft PPT and Google Slides, but it will be really nasty. This is a very good tool. You can have a precise control over it. So use the tools effectively. Guys. Do not love the tools and just dwell on it. Always use the tools whenever it's required. Don't get addicted for the tools. Okay, so have your pen, paper, sketchbook as your first tool. I would say if you are really wanted to become a big designer. I'm saying you want to really cross lakhs and crores of revenue and you wanted to make a design industry and you want to create a lasting impact in design. Please have a notepad, diary sketchbook with you. You will definitely become that designer. If you wanted to just become a designer who earns 50, 60,000amonth or maximum 1 lakh, 2 lakh a month. Yeah. Start with all these fancy tools because that much is the maximum reach you can go. You can't have a big visionary thinking because I know people who use a lot of tools. They don't get really big people who really start with their heart. Start with paper pencil, that's the first tool and then go into software. They make a fortune in design. I've seen that practically and I myself has really evolved like that. I worked in national projects, international project, got one national award. Currently working in India's best design studio. I worked with more than 15, 16 country designers and I really know what really worked well for me and I've observed patterns with other designers having talked to them. Okay, so it's up to you to choose whatever way you want. Nobody is forcing anybody. Right? Thank you so much guys. And if you need my mentorship support to really help you out in becoming more accountable to learn this kind of stuffs in a detailed way, take my mentorship program. Send to that email dfc designforchangemail.com I'll be putting you in my intensive program which will make you get results in less than three months to double or triple your salary. Okay, but if you like this podcast, I recommend you to give a five star rating in Apple Spotify. Subscribe and see you in another episode. Bye bye. Thank you.