15 free tools to create all your digital content without photoshop!

Content creation is the nerve of your web presence: 

whether it's to feed social networks or to enrich your website, your communication goes through an image, a video or an editorial content adapted to your channels and in line with your DNA.

You have to learn to juggle with the different formats requested by the platforms, but also with the weight and referencing constraints to publish your content and ensure its performance, i.e. its readability, virality or simply its loading time.

Here is a selection of fifteen free tools that have been tested and validated to create digital content without the help of a graphic or web designer. 

The web is full of applications or tools for content creation.

I've put them through 3 filters: 

free, easy to use and quality, to make sure they are suitable for the different uses and constraints of the different media but also to guarantee that they offer a professional and stylish rendering.

• Two free and royalty-free image banks
• How does it work in practice?
• Two tools to create content like a pro
• Two tools to generate video content
• A tool to crop without using Photoshop
• Two tools to stage your products
• Two tools to generate color palettes and identify color profiles
• Identify a color profile
• Generate harmonious and trendy color palettes
• Two free tools to download fonts
• Two tools to get more design ideas
• Two free and royalty-free image banks

There are nearly a hundred image banks that claim to be "free". Among them, I have chosen Pexels and Pixabay, which meet the following requirements:

Free and royalty-free download and use (for personal or commercial use)

Richness of the bank (number and recency of the contents)

Professional quality of the visuals/videos/illustrations

Modernity of the visuals (aesthetics, shooting, recency)

Display filters by size/definition, color, category, orientation

Filter by content type (photos, video, illustration, ...)

Powerful search tool (semantic suggestion, advanced search, ...)

Adaptation of the internal search engine to the French language

Information on the origin of the photo/video and its usage rate

How does it work concretely?

The internal search engine is used with a more or less generic term depending on the number and relevance of the results. It can be interesting to test synonyms or expressions related to the semantic field of the searched term. Also, some banks are not translated, so it is recommended to write the keyword in English to maximize your search.

After clicking on the chosen photo/video, you select the desired resolution and click on the download link. Pexels even offers a great custom resizing feature.

Some image banks require the creation of or connection to an account to allow the downloading of visuals, this is not the case with Pexels or Pixabay.

Can't find what you're looking for? Here's a list (not exhaustive) of image banks, free or with free download offers: Burst, Kaboompics, Stickpng (.png bank! ), Skitter Photo, Pic Jumbo, Unsplash, Free Images, Fotomelia, Pixambo, DevoStock, Plixs, Streetwill, StockSnap, Free Stocks, Public Domain Pictures, New Old Stock, Designers Pics, Death To The Stock Photo, Realistic Shots, Unsplash, Gratisography, but also the most famous ones Pinterest, Adobe Stock, 500px, Flickr, ...

Two tools to create content like a pro

You need a logo, a presentation or to create designs to feed your website or your social networks? Canva will become your favorite application... its free version allows you to create professional and trendy contents, very easily, with access to a bank of visuals and very intuitive creation tools. You can either download the application or the desktop version, accessible after creating an account.

Here is how it works:

You choose the subject of your creative: Facebook post, Instagram story, logo, etc.

You access a bank of fully customizable templates

You upload your own visuals if needed

You modify the wording with your editorial content, with the possibility to choose from a list of fonts

You use the dashboard tools to reduce, change the location, add text, etc.

You upload the content in the right format and feed it directly to your social networks

It is also possible to start from a blank template to create your content entirely and use only a frame already in the format requested by the social platform you want to feed.

With the same operation as Canva, Crello is the second tool to quickly create designs for your social posts or different media. Like Canva, it offers a free version and is suitable for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest. It also allows you to easily create commercial banners for your website, with an equally intuitive use.

We could mention the competing tools Desygner or DesignCap, but the templates are less rich and less modern in my opinion.

Two tools to generate video content

Of all content, video is the king of web marketing and brand content. Relevant, entertaining and qualitative, video ensures engagement and virality on social networks, or immersion and experience on your different channels. Here again, many tools exist to make small clips or short video montages.

I tested and really liked Promo and Animator but the trial version only allows... testing, and the purpose of this article is to find free tools, at least to start with.

On these two sites, you won't be able to use your creation without registering a credit card, and it costs about 30€ per month. The templates are numerous and the customization is very simple, based on drag and drop and customization of already designed inserts.

Music, cinematic management, animations: you can make a really good video in just 30 minutes.

I have chosen two tools that offer a free trial or basic version, and that offer an intuitive solution and a professional rendering: Play PlayPlay and Lumen5.

Based on pre-packaged templates, you can upload your own content (photos, texts and videos) to animate them. Lumen5 has a very practical feature that consists in loading the visual and editorial content of your site (you enter the URL and the magic happens).

Both tools provide access to a rich gallery of templates, categorized according to the various business, marketing or professional functions of the final video.

The clip formats are automatically adapted according to the distribution channel chosen beforehand: Instagram story, Facebook post, tweet,...

A tool to crop without using Photoshop

In e-commerce it is common to need to show a cropped photo in product sheets or photo catalogs for product flows. Remove allows for ultra-fast and high-quality cropping, which would make a Photoshop expert swoon.

Two tools to stage your products

To stage your website or your application on a phone screen, computer screen, or even on a t-shirt, there are tools like Dunnnk or Place It (go to "free templates"), which allow you to make the famous "mock-up". It's a great way to show a website that doesn't exist yet, to showcase an MVP or to promote your logo on derivative products without having to make them.

Two options:

Either the tool automatically generates the staging after downloading the visual to be integrated in the chosen image (this is the case for Dunk)

Or you have to download the mock-up and integrate from Photoshop the visual on the layer named "place design" (this is the case for Place It)

Two tools to generate color palettes and identify color profiles

Identify a color profile

You have spotted on the internet a color that you want to reproduce identically? You want to know the RGB references of a photo or a font color?

Download the Colorzilla extension (available for Chrome and Firefox), use the eyedropper to select the color in question: the tool gives you the RGB references, which you can then enter in the different palettes you are working on!

Generate harmonious and trendy color palettes

Colorzilla offers other options than the "color picker": you can analyze the color palette of a site via its "webpage color analyser" tool available in the extension menu.

My second favorite for creating color harmonies is the Colors site: it generates hundreds of palettes to give inspirations of colors that match, whether for a graphic charter or for a vector creation.

You can explore combinations but also generate them, from a color you provide or from a photo you load... then you just have to get the profile of the different colors of the palette (in hexadecimal, RGB, CMYK, ...).

To go further: Color Hunt and Adobe Color.

Two free tools to download fonts

For classic and SEO friendly fonts, Google Font is the reference for downloading.

You choose a number of filters (language/alphabet, font type) and you have access to the entire family of a font for free download and free use (there are just under 1000 fonts available).

The advantage of Google fonts is that the fonts do not need to be downloaded by your browser and therefore do not degrade your web performance: their use guarantees that your natural referencing will not be degraded by the use of original and non-referenced fonts.

There is a plethora of sites offering font downloads. If I had to name only one, it would be Dafont for its rich database and its ease of use.

Two tools to get a lot of design ideas

Behance is THE reference for graphic and web designers to get inspired and share their work.

In the form of a gallery, the site classifies by software/art techniques an impressive bank of content, enough to find inspiration from the best professionals.

You can also benchmark the work of web designers or famous agencies on sites like Dribble or Lapa Ninja.