Graphic design software can seem pretty specialized. It’s designed for creatives to do creative work, and although the programs are powerful and feature many helpful capabilities, they can only do what they can do. They can also be expensive. The all apps subscription for the Adobe Creative Cloud is $52.99 per month. You get a ton of valuable apps and services, but for new or small businesses, that can be a hefty fee.
The question, especially for small businesses, becomes whether to try to use free software, cheaper software, try to learn graphic design on their own, or invest in a Graphic Designer. It’s a tough decision. For brand new businesses, it often makes sense to learn basic graphic design to start out. After the business is in motion and bringing in money, it becomes more viable to hire a designated Designer. Even for businesses who’ve been around for a while, adding a team member or freelancer is a costly investment.
But when small businesses decide this investment will spur more growth and sales (as good graphic design does), what do they use the software for? And how does excellent graphic design ultimately drive more sales and revenue for these businesses?
How Small Businesses Use Graphic Design Software
Each business has its own structure and plan for growth. There’s not a secret to make it easier besides putting in the hard work. One way to grow that may at first seem insignificant is having good graphic design for the business.
Here are four ways small businesses use graphic design software to grow and expand their reach.
Branding
Every company must develop and maintain a brand—how they appear to customers and clients, and in general what they’re all about. Branding includes elements such as logos, icons, color palette, fonts, and any variations the business may need.
To create these important elements, Graphic Designers use programs such as Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is the most flexible of the Adobe programs because every individual piece of a graphic is customizable down a single pixel. It performs well in colors and shapes, too, which makes it flexible to work with when creating branding.
Adobe Illustrator has similar capabilities but works with vector graphics. This simply means that rather than individual pixels, the lines created on art in Illustrator come from mathematical equations—they’ll be able to scale to any size and remain as clear as when first designed. This program is ideal for projects with tiny details and is the “king” of fonts within the Adobe programs. Designers can hand draw fonts and Illustrator will turn it into a vector graphic to be used in any design.
Both programs offer their own perks for business branding, but ultimately they’re both favorites of seasoned Graphic Designers. Well-designed branding can draw in customers who are intrigued by the art and the story behind it. Having consistent messaging and images across multiple platforms also creates higher levels of customer and client trust.
Social Media & Website Graphics
Social media sites and websites are digital hotspots for bringing in customers and clients. With numerous platforms like Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok, great graphic design has perhaps never been more important. To stay competitive, businesses must be able to design striking graphics in all sorts of sizes and formats. Not to mention websites designed to convert sales.
Graphic Designers pull from a number of different graphic design softwares to create stunning social media and website graphics. Photoshop and Illustrator are, of course, continued favorites because of the ability to work with details and create from scratch. Photoshop can take a photo and turn it into an almost unrecognizable fantasy and Illustrator can create wonderfully detailed patterns and characters.
Another Adobe program Designers love when handling many images is Photoshop Lightroom. Made for Photographers, Lightroom allows creatives to make edits to a large number of photos at once, as well as to organize them and make them sortable. It may seem a less obvious choice because it doesn’t offer the creative elements like the other programs, but for brand photoshoots and visually-based businesses, Lightroom is a great tool for creating a cohesive look across many platforms without having to edit images one at a time.
Digital Products
Digital products can create new revenue streams, both brick-and-mortar and online-only businesses. Whether a company offers free products, often called lead generation or “freebies” in exchange for customers joining their email list, or they create printables, there’s almost always a place for a well-designed digital product in any business.
To create these products, there are a number of great resources in the Adobe Creative Cloud world. Adobe InDesign is a fantastic tool for creating resources with both text and images. The program is used heavily by the publishing industry for its ability to handle long documents and design pages down to the word. This is great news for businesses who are thinking about selling an eBook or lengthy PDF document to bring in some passive income.
Photoshop and Illustrator make the list once again (a pattern is beginning to emerge), although perhaps for a different reason than expected. Photoshop is best known for its photo editing capabilities, and ability to create fantastically creative works of art. For businesses who work in a visual industry, having the ability to create beautiful original art to sell in their store is a pretty great asset.
Meanwhile, Illustrator is known for working with illustration, as it was designed to do. It also excels at creating unique patterns, which are used by almost all Designers in the package design industry. Having a way to uniquely package products is a great way to stand out in a crowded market digitally and with physical products. Not to mention, the character design capabilities and 90+ illustration tools that could be used to create a character who represents the business on any future digital products.
Marketing Proposals
Before most major business projects begin, creative or otherwise, the project is proposed and accepted. These proposals, called Marketing Proposals, reflect the anticipated outcome and final vision for the work. It includes the expected timeline, deliverables, and graphics of what the project will look like when it’s complete.
For industries like Architecture, marketing proposals help clients visualize the project and how it will get there. Key components of these marketing proposals are colored illustrations, black and white sketches, and blueprints.
In other industries (for instance, a website design project for a small business) a marketing proposal would include pieces such as how many pages will be on the website, what colors, fonts, types of graphics, and how the user will navigate through and interact with the website. To create these in-depth proposals, graphic design software is a must.
For putting together the actual document, Illustrator has many professional templates with the ability to customize each aspect. It can do the illustrations and graphics, as well as digitize hand-drawn designs. Additionally, the artboards feature is helpful for marketing proposals because the Designer has up to 1,000 separate artboards (essentially canvases) on which to design without having to save those pages to different files. Convenient for often detailed proposals.
Photoshop is also helpful; for creating graphics and artwork. When good illustration and artwork are added to proposals, it helps the document do the heavy lifting of sharing the overall project vision. If the project will have many photos, Lightroom is also a good choice (for instance, if a Graphic Designer is proposing a website for a Photographer).