I culled a bunch of different sites, but here are the main ones. For most of them, they allow you to upload your own photos or use stock ones, let you add text, some have video options, etc.
To get a feel for them, one of the best ways is to assign yourself a specific sample project. For myself, I have a book challenge that I do every month, and the members want book badges. I have no real skill in doing this. I did my first two months in Powerpoint using existing clipart and the covers of the books we were reading. Kind of cheesy, but hey, they got book badges.
- spark.adobe.com — Adobe’s free tool, although of course they also try to upsell you on Premium templates. Didn’t thrill me.
- https://www.canva.com — There’s a pro version, but not needed. This was more of a business card design, but it had potential.
- https://getstencil.com/ — Simple layouts (text and stock graphics). I’ve seen worse, certainly, and it did give me some ideas.
- https://www.remove.bg/ — Remove backgrounds, add different ones
This was a totally random try on something. It auto-removes backgrounds from pictures. Gave it a go. I took a photo I pulled from an episode of Continuum in Season 1 that looked like this:
One upload and a click or two later, it let me remove the BG and gave me options for a totally different one. Sweet work.
- https://snappa.com — Like Canva with a bit better interface, designed to add text to stock images. Meh.
But perhaps that wasn’t a fair test since I’m really looking for something more like a logo than a graphic post.
- https://www.freelogodesign.org/ — predesigned options, hard to edit
- https://hatchful.shopify.com — clean tool, decent but limited options, I didn’t try editing it too much to change colours.
There were a long list of other ones that I tried, and it was all free right up until you went to download the logo. At that point, it was $20-$80 but they promised “high-resolution” files. Hmmph.
Most of the sites did well for stock photos and some text, but that is easily done in just about any program, including Powerpoint. Not sure it really added anything for me. The logo makers were nice but ultimately unfulfilling.
