You don’t have to be a graphic designer to create custom, professional-looking images to use in your presentations, documents or on your website. Free tools can be used in combination to make custom logos, icons, blog headers and more! My go-to sites for image creation are Canva.com, thenounproject.com and LunaPic.com
3 Steps to Create Custom Images
Step 1: Icons, Icons and More Icons!
Start by visiting thenounproject.com to search their incredible collection of over 1 million icons. Images can be downloaded as PNG or JPG files. All images from Noun Project are on a transparent background, which makes them easy to layer. The website is free to use, provided you give attribution for any images you download. I use this website so often, I purchased a premium subscription (discounted for educators), which allows me unlimited, royalty-free use and additional features.
Step 2: Customize Colors
If you want to customize the color of your icon or change something about it, you can do so using, LunaPic, a free image editing website. Upload your icon and use the Paint Bucket tool to choose the color you want to apply. When trying to color match, consider downloading the EyeDropper Chrome Extension which allows you to use your cursor to pick a color from a webpage and reveals the associated color codes. Once you have the color codes, you can then use the “Add Custom Color” option within the “Paint Bucket” tool inside LunaPic to apply a custom color.
Step 3: Layering Images on a Canvas
Creating a custom image requires a workspace where you can layer, re-size and move elements around. My all-time favorite site for this step is Canva. With Canva, you can customize a background, add beautiful text with their wide-range of available fonts, upload your own images and more! Within Canva, I build my custom image using the icons I have pulled together in steps 1 & 2 above and utilize the many features in Canva to bring everything together and create a finished product that I can then download as a PNG or JPG.
All of my blog header images for this site were created using the steps and tools above. There are many other options available for this type of work. I’m no artist but appreciate a good looking presentation, document or website, so learning how to leverage free tools to build great images is important to me. I’d love to hear from readers what tools you use for creating custom images! Please share in the comments section below.
