Graphic Design Software:10 Software and Benefits

Adobe PhotoShop

Adobe Photoshop is great graphic design software for photo editing.
It is one of the most popular ones in the market in a robust package that offers great design capabilities.

Key Features

• Design Tools: It offers different design tools for both mobile apps and the web
• Creative Cloud: Its synchronizations with the cloud offer unique features like content-aware crop, face-aware liquify, artboards, a glyph panel, cloud documents, touch and stylus input support, etc.
• Open Source GIMP Software: If you do not want to pay for the software, then you can download and install it. Moreover, it is important to install it on a powerful machine to avoid lag and performance issues.
• User Interface: It provides a friendly user interface. Moreover, by targeting workspace layouts, including graphic and web, Motion, 3D, and photography, you can create your custom layouts of panels and windows.

Pros and Cons

This software has different pros and cons. These are as follows:
Pros of Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop provides you with a mobile application along with a web application.

It has a great user interface with assistance for easy use.
It has a rich set of typography and drawing tools.

Moreover, it comes with 3D design capabilities, offers a library and phoo management with Creative Cloud.

Adobe Photoshop provides efficient file transfer, multiple design tools that come with responsive graphics, and provides the ability to edit animations and video layers.

Graphic designers are able to define the size of the canvas, create custom brushes, isolate elements from backgrounds, work in 3D mode and other elements.

Moreover, it provides a free version for 30 days so you can test it out.

Cons of Adobe Photoshop
This software offers photoshop with a subscription to Creative cloud which in turn is more costly and not a great deal for those who do not want to buy it.

It has tons of different features that can most often overwhelm you.

Moreover, it offers lessor support for raster and vector images like SVG files.

CoralDraw Graphics Suite

Coral Draw comes with some really good pro-features and offers an accessible user-friendly interface.

Moreover, it is a bundle of multiple applications that provides powerful editing tools.

Key Features
The Key Features of the CoralDraw Graphics suite are as follows:

• Content Exchange: It is a digital library you can get access to. It provides high-resolution photographs and digital images, moreover, offering vehicle templates, fonts, interactive frames, gradients, vectors, and bitmap files.
• Customizable UI: It gives you a customizable UI environment for desktop, icon sizing, toolbox options, and window border color scheme. You can visit its community website to design macros that suit your workflow.
• Payment Options: CorelDraw offers 3 payment programs that you can upgrade.
• New Pointilizer: CorelDraw offers a new pointilizer with variable parameters that are not limited to regular dots.
  

  

Pros and Cons of CorelDraw Graphics Suite

The Pros and Cons of CorelDraw Graphics Suite are as follows:
Pros of CorelDraw Graphic Suite

It works perfectly without any lag with Surface Pen, you get an option to chose GPU acceleration and allows a smooth transition from desktop to tablet mode that leverages touch features.

Moreover, CorelDraw offers app-wide workflow and under-the-hood innovations with performance enhancements, offers better EPS and third-party PDF importing capabilities, and is able to export files in 4 file types.

Cons of CoralDraw Graphics Suite

Coreldraw does not come with a mobile app, has many different payment options that can confuse you.

Moreover, it is not user-friendly, especially for beginners.

Sketch

If you are looking for an app, web, and interface vector-based graphic design, then Sketch is the right app for you.
It is best for creating interactive prototypes for UI or UX purposes.

Key Features
The Key Features of Sketch are as follows:

• Mobile and Web: It is a great software for mobile and web, providing leverage grids, snap to grid functionality, and snap to pixel functionality. There are important to ensure a perfect responsive design or multiple screen sizes and resolutions
• Cost: It offers yearly subscriptions that are significantly lower than other subscriptions.
• Custom Plugins: You can find custom plugins for specific tasks.
• Templates: Sketch offers a library of artboard templates for iOS devices and responsive web design layouts. You just need to select an artboard and the device.

Pros and Cons of Sketch

Different Pros and Cons of Sketch are as Follows:
Pors of Sketch
Sketch allows easy sharing and collaborations through a cloud, you can mirror designs on large devices for team viewing, and can export any layer or ground as a PNG file.

Moreover, it allows you to autosave all the changes in the design, step by step to avoid any loss, you can leverage libraries with Android icons Ios icons, or Mac icons and it requires a low learning curve.
Cons of Sketch
It is a new design tool, therefore, there is a lot of room for enhancements, offers limited illustration capabilities.

Moreover, screens do not render high resolution while you access from the cloud, are available for Mac users only and there is an absence of automatic layout flowing options.

Adobe InDesign

If you are in the business of publishing, then Adobe Indesign is a must-have software.

Moreover, this software offers capabilities to design stunning magazines, info sheets, and brochures while easily exporting them from PDF format to HTML.

Key Features
The Key Features of Adobe InDesign are as follows:

• Layout: You can adjust to change the text of the template and design to get automatically adjust which is excellent for infographics
• Easy to Use: Indesign has a low learning curve, which means that if you are a beginner then you can learn it quickly
• Adobe InCopy: You can leverage InCopy to work with other members of your team by sharing text, colors, and graphics
• Sensei Technology: AI-powered Sensei technology makes sure to automatically resize and arrange images

Pros and Cons of Adobe InDesign

The Pros and Cons of Adobe InDesign are as follows:
Pros of Adobe InDesign
It allows you to efficiently combine graphics and texts for easier streamlining, add tags to indexes, keywords, anchor tet frames, footnotes, table of contents, and captions along with hyperlinks.

Moreover, it supports HTML exporting which is great for web developers and works well for WordPress sites.

Adobe InDesign help to eliminate redundant tags in HTML files has the ability to resize multiple objects and can change the width and height at the same time, you can leverage Eyedrop tools and is an industry-standard for desktop publishing.

Cons of Adobe InDesign
It is not much user-friendly and is only suitable for enterprises only.

Moreover, it is relatively expensive than other software and PDF comment integration needs more perfection.

Inkscape

It is free graphic design software that can help you to create scalable designs.

These designs will not stretch or blur during the resizing of the image.

Moreover, it is user-friendly for hobbyists or beginners who are interested in vector drawing.
Key Features
The Key Features of Inkscape are as follows:

• Updates: It has a robust community of developers that enables it to provide regular updates and new features. Moreover, its latest update has mesh gradients, a checkboard background to view transparency, improved spray and measurement tools.
• User Friendly: The user experience is very impressive if you are a vector designer. If you are familiar with the tools of adobe, it gives you an extra advantage in using this software
• Improvements: You can leverage the open-source code to change the lines of code and enhance the software
• Cost: It is one of the most capable software alternatives to Adobe Illustrator and is a free tool as well.
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Pros and Cons of Inkscape

The Pros and Cons of Inkscape are as follows:
Pors of Inkscape
It allows you to make individual text lines, supports multiple gradients, and comes with a separate tool to create complex combinations.

Moreover, it is equipped with Bezier handles, offers different well-designed and full-featured tools to create, edit, or convert vectors, is capable of downloading or creating ready-made plugins, and allows you to leverage different categories of filters.

Cons of Inkscape
You will have to convert Inkscape streaming text into plain text, for exporting, and the Mac version has errors in it.

Moreover, its processing is a bit slower than others, and its compatibility is not perfect with Illustrator.

Affinity Designer

Affinity software is clean, capable, and a cheap alternative to Adobe Illustrator.

Moreover, it offers an excellent budget proposition that is easy to use and faster than Illustrator.

Key Features
The Key Features of Affinity designer are as follows:

• Grid Systems: It provides versatile grid systems while creating isometric video game designs and icons.
• Dual Environment: You can work in both pixel art environments and vector art environments. without opening other applications,
• Zoom Feature: Its zoom feature can gas far as 1,000,000 percent, which enables you to design with precision and accuracy
• Snapping Options: You can lock and position objects and elements depending on indifferent things, including grids, alignment guides, shapes, and nodes o other objects

Pros and Cons of Affinity Designer

Pros and Cons of Affinity Designer are as follows:
Procs of Affinity Designer
It allows you to leverage on-screen guides to ensure objects and designs with accurate measurements, can create smooth and accurate curves, has Boolean Operations which is capable of efficiently moving and editing parts of shapes.

Moreover, it offers a wide selection of colors, you are allowed to apply for your work on multiple projects and its iPad app is as powerful as its desktop version.
Cons of Affinity Designer
Cons of Affinity designer include the absence of perspective grid, it does not allow to export files in AI, and there is the absence of vector eraser.

Moreover, some viable tools are missing that are available in Illustrator.

Adobe Illustrator

Illustrator is more than just a graphic design software.
It is a perfect software for creating illustrative artwork, page layouts, logos, website mockups, and almost everything.

Moreover, it is an Industry Benchmark in vector creation tools.

Key Features
The Key Features of Adobe Illustrator are as follows:

• In-Panel Editing: It allows you to edit multiple artboards at the same time to work more efficiently
• Customizable: Illustrator is highly customizable through multiple present layouts along with other options. Moreover, you can leverage the drag and drop feature to move panels anywhere.
• User Interface: It is a user-friendly software, and offers custom viewing and space-saving features to help you work on any device
• Compatible: It is highly compatible with numerous devices and have different configurations from Mac and Windows

Pros and Cons of Adobe Illustrator

The Pros and Cons of Adobe Illustrator are as follows:
Pros of Adobe Illustrator
It generates graphics-based pixels on mathematical equations to ensure crisp and sharp lines, creates graphics files in relatively small sizes and you can access over 90 million images graphics, templates, and videos from Adobe Stock.

Moreover, you can use Adobe font integration to select different fonts and tight integration with other products.

Cons of Adobe Illustrator
As compared to other vector design software it is costly, a lot of features are often overwhelming for users and can take a lot of space in your device.

GIMP, GNU Image Manipulation Program

This software is more than just a photo editor.
It offers great Photoshop features for free. Moreover, it provides professional-quality functions to fine-tune the snaps and create artworks from scratch.

Key Features
The Key features of GIMP are as follows:

• Updates: It gets regular updates because of a community of developers and also additional features
• GEGL Scripts: It is one of the best features and makes it an open platform for image processing
• Flexibility: Illustrator is a user-friendly software, with different incredible plugins for added features. Most importantly they are free of cost
• Compatibility: This software is compatible with different operating systems including macOS, Linux, Windows, Solaris, and BDS.

Pros and Cons of GIMP

The Pros and Cons of GIMP are as follows:
Pros of GIMP
It allows you to sketch using different tools like cloning, pencil, and airbrush, GIMP offers tutorials for every feature and its layers allow you to design an image under an existing image.

Moreover, It is clean and easy to use, has options of working on a modular and single-window interface as well as very lightweight to ensure speedy performance.

Cons of GIMP
The cons of GIMP are that is not a great option for Mac Users, and the adjustment layers come with a non-destructive way of combining multiple photo manipulations.

Moreover, it does not get regular updates.

Xara Designer Pro X

This software comes with advanced features and tools while providing advanced design elements.

Moreover, this software is great for web and print design solutions to create illustrations, edit photos, and design web pages.

Key Features
The Key Features of Xara Designer are as follows:

• Performance: It offers fast performance and gives you an easy way to implement creativity. Moreover, allowing you to make a number of modifications through unlimited redo and undo options
• Direct Action Tools: The ‘direct action tools’ offers robust features and stable functionalities for general usage
• Super Fast: This software is one of the fastest and most sophisticated vector rendering engines. Moreover, it gives you the capability to deliver more complex designs efficiently
• Drop and Drag Feature: Time saving and intuitive feature which allows you to zoom up to 25,000 % and leverage direct toot for fast execution.

Pros and Cons of Xara Designer

The Pros and Cons of this software are as follows:
Pros of Xara Designer
This software offers substantial editing options, offers anti-aliasing to improve the quality of on-screen images, and comes with cloud capabilities to view, edit and update documents.

Moreover, the zoom tool is capable of zooming up to 25,000%, is capable of syncing files with Dropbox and Google Drive, and offers support to an extensive range of formats.

It also supports importing and exporting Adobe PSD files including layer support, alpha channel, and 16-bit color, and CMYK layer conversion.

Cons of Xara Designer
Xara Designer is only available for Windows, requires a steep learning curve to use all the features effectively.

Moreover, the masking feature can be cumbersome and difficult to understand.

Gravit Designer

Gravit Designer is an HTML-based software.
It is a great software for vector graphics that delivers high-quality images and is most suitable for graphic, product, and web design professionals.

Key Features
The Key Features includes:

• Tools and Effects: It offers different tools like Beigon tool, Lasso tools, and Pen tools, thus allowing you to add multiple files to an element
• Portable: It is portable with different operating systems like Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS that enables you to work from any device
• Dashboard: The dashboard allows you to easily navigate and allows you to switch between tables or to switch dark themes.
• Pages: The pages features is a perfect blend of artboards and pages that comes with its canvas settings

Pros and Cons of Gravit Designer

The pros and cons of Gravit designer are as follows:
Pros of Gravit Designer
It offers a modern user interface, offers an implicit way to design social media posts, and natural flexibility through web and desktop versions.
Moreover, it allows you to edit scalable vector designs, supports multiple file formats, and you can easily open multiple documents and go to the papers on the tab.

Its pro version offers unlimited cloud storage as well.

Cons of Gravit Designer
On official resources, there is not enough information, and real-time collaboration is also absent.

Moreover, designers are not able to run prototypes of smartphones and the fonts need an active internet connection to work.

To Sum, it All Up

Choosing the best graphic design software is tricky and depends on what you want to create.

You will need to decide for yourself what software works best for you, the design, styles, needs, and medium. Moreover, choosing what type of software you need also depends greatly on your client. However, there is always new software to discover and use.
In this article, we have tried to sum up some of the best graphic design software along with their pros and cons. Do leave a comment if you find this article useful and read other articles or blogs of Markfiniti here.