When people start their business, often times they can't afford to employ a graphic designer to create design work for them on regular basis. I am a firm believer that when it comes to the creation of a brand identity, you should always turn to a professional, but for everyday projects like social media posts, presentations, webinars and so on, you may be able to do the work yourself.
Just in situations like that, you need a powerful tool to help you with the creative work. Especially, if you don't have much experience in that field.
The good news is, there are plenty of online design tools you can use these days. Perhaps you've heard of the biggest players on that market - Canva, Crello, Google Slides, Prezi. But there's a tool that combines all these and adds its own magic to the mix. It's called Visme.
I didn't know about Visme up until a month ago. I was contacted by their marketing team to try the platform and see if I could use it continuously in my work. At first, I was sceptic because I thought, what's the point. I already use Canva and I'm very happy with it. I can create pretty much everything on it without much hassle. But hey, it doesn't hurt to try.
It turns out, this is a platform that has been developed for 7 years and undergone many upgrades to get to the point it is as the moment. It's used by a variety of businesses, from solopreneurs, to large organisations and educational institutions.
What's Visme
The unique feature of Visme is actually the fact it combines a few other design tools. It's not simply a platform where you can create a presentation or a webinar. It's not just a tool for social media graphics and logo design. It's both.
As a longtime user of Canva, I know it can do most of these things, but a major issue I have with the platform is that everyone seems to be using it. That's a problem, because a ton of different brands and businesses end up using the same templates, graphics or images on their social media and websites. It kills the identity of each of those brands.
One of the main website design trends for 2020 is using custom images across platforms. This becomes a challenge for more small businesses and solopreneurs. Because Canva is so affordable, almost every person who does business online uses it. They have a great bank of images, but unfortunately, it isn't updated as frequently as I would like. And then we start struggling for unique visual content, that would perform well on visual search engines like Pinterest, for example. Here comes Visme.
One of the main advantages of the platform is that once you get one of the paid plans, you have access to an enormous library of images, graphics, motion graphics and templates. And they are different from those you see on the other big design platforms!
Other Advantages of Visme
Visme is really easy to use. It is quite an intuitive platform and if you've ever used Canva or Crello you will feel at home using Visme.
The platform also solves a potential problem for some Apple users. PowerPoint don't usually come free with a MacBook, so you have to pay for it separately. If you don't want to do that your only option is Google Slides. And in my experience, Slides is still quite limiting in what you could do in terms of design. Visme solves that problem too. Not only the slide templates are more exiting, but also much easier to edit, add and remove items on them.
So creating an engaging webinar or a long presentation becomes a very easy task.
Thinking of creating an e-book? You are probably dreading the design process if you don't have much design experience. I know how that feels. I've spent countless hours to get the right look for a freebie. Not very productive. But playing with Visme, I discovered, that the process can be much quicker and easier. There are ready templates and you can change every bit on them without too much effort. What is more, you get to add animation to your e-book pages. Now that's gold, because some sort of movement on the screen, while your consumer is reading, will keep them engaged with the content.
Since I mentioned animation, these are actually motion graphics or gifs. In most graphic tools you can only change the colour of (some) still images. Altering colours on gifs is a no go. Not with Visme. Here you can completely customise even motion graphics to match your branding. And that's pretty cool!
Maintaining your brand identity at all times is crucial to the strength of your brand and the ability of consumers to recognise your business. At the beginning of the branding process, you should have picked a colour palette and fonts. And these should be consistently present across your digital channels and content.
In many cases, when a professional graphic designer was involved in the creation of the brand identity, he or she would have used custom fonts for your brand. These may be hard to replicate when using online design tools on your own. But with the premium version of Visme, you can also upload custom fonts, theme colours and even audio. I am quite excited about that last one. I know you can do it on Google Slides, but I actually plan to use it for some social posts and promote the audio articles available at Teach Me How to Biz.
Any Disadvantages?
Well, in a perfect world Visme would be available entirely for free. But the world isn't perfect and with Visme you actually get what you pay for. There are different types plans designed for different needs. If you don't expect to be creating too much graphic content or just want to jazz up your presentations with new templates, you may be fine with using the basic free plan. It has limitations on the number of projects you could do per month and the visuals you could use. If you want unlimited access to the image and graphics library you can upgrade to a paid plan starting at $14 p/m (when billed annually).
Bigger organisations have the opportunity to choose different plans with even more features and incentives. It's great to look at this price comparison to give you a better understanding of what you will be getting for your money.
All in all, I'm happy I was introduced to Visme because it's given me fresh ideas and even more options. Who doesn't like options, right?
