8 freebies to create your own visuals

1-2. Venngage & Beam

Venngage is a drag-and-drop online design tool with tons of templates for infographics, reports, posters, promotional materials, and social media posts. The sheer wealth and variety of free recyclable graphics along with its user-friendly interface makes it a must for anyone looking to jazz up their online platforms.

Beam is Venngage's 100 percent free online chart maker. Design cute, humorous, nonsensical graphs like Buzzfeed's Cheese Lovers' series, or pick a chic colour palette, insert your data straight from Excel and let Beam work its magic.

3. Recite

Visual quotations that incorporate beautiful design/photography and typography work great as motivation boosters on Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr. Recite does just that. Simply type in your quotation and see it generated on a range of templates. Pick the one that suits you best and share it on social media directly from the website.

4. Pablo

Pablo by Buffer is ideal for that blog header or Twitter post. Upload your own image or pick one from their vast library of high quality photos, add some text, customise your font, and voila, the perfect social media image is at your disposal.

5. Designbold

Designbold has great freebies for social media posts, document and letter templates, blog and ebook designs, infographics, posters, stickers, brochures, events and invitation cards, online and Facebook ads, and almost anything you can think of. Elegant and classy, Designbold takes an editorial approach to design, leaving you with professional-looking visuals suitable for any business presentation or luxury magazine page.

6. Stencil

In the company's own words, Stencil is a "ridiculously simple image creation for social media marketers, bloggers and small businesses." Similar to Canva, the website focuses mainly on posts for social media, with a cool quote integration function for inspirational posts. While Stencil's templates boast bold typography and eye-catching, unique designs, they're part of their paid plan. However, they're great for inspiration for your own designs. With 10 free high-res images per month and plenty of classic photo filters, you will not be disappointed with the final results.

7-8. Figma & Vectr

Figma and Vectr both allow you to design your own vectors and both have desktop apps. Figma is the very "first interface design tool with real-time collaboration", which means you and your teammate can work on the same design at the same time. Both tools let you download PNGs, which means they're very cross-platform friendly. While intuitive, they're pretty technical and require a good deal of experimenting. These ones are for the true enthusiasts.

The writer is In-charge of the career publication of The Daily Star and a senior at the Institute of Business Administration, University of Dhaka