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Summary:

This discussion covers the use of icons and background images for marketing material, product development. It touches upon the following aspects as you read through for more info. Please join us with your comments below to share your experience with fellow entrepreneurs who are out there to make a difference.

• Professional presentations, wire frames and product development icons
• Freewares and start up resources for design
• DIY and professional third parties

Designs in marketing and product development

A lot of your startup effort boils down to the use of resources. Design is an integral part of your product development and marketing. Both of these impinge on your creativity. As a startup, the demands are higher and expectations are bigger since the competition is significant and the barrier to entry is quite large. Creativity is one good way to create differentiation.

Being constantly forced to step out of the comfort zone, we ended up using some free wares available for design purposes – these included our initial pitch decks, marketing presentations and external communication collateral. After a while these freeware fell short of our requirements and we had to turn our way towards professional aids. That led us to some useful collections such as shutterstock and noun project.

Background images, website aids

For our marketing presentations and website development, we initially looked at free collections such as pixabay, etc. these were great for some initial social media designs. Something to be aware of is their Creative Commons license , Most of them offer free adaptation rights while some demand an attribution. It is best to read the licenses when you download an image. We combined this with Canva which gave us a reasonable advantage over our previous poor designs. As this fell short we slowly started moving towards better image collections through shutterstock.

Paid Versions:

• Pros: wide image selection, great image quality, clear image editing freedom

Cons: cost

Freewares

• Pros: freeware

• Limitations: attributions, smaller collection, repeated across different websites

Icons

Another great aid we found was the use of icons in PPTs and product development icons. Most of the standard icons available in the freeware were quite limited and the designs weren’t very modern. In order to fill into this we started using some paid versions. The most useful ones of the lot has been nounproject which has paid for itself over its usage term.

Your comments:

It was a great aid to start working on the designs ourselves and did a great job with initial wire frames and presentations we went to investors with. Of course with time we went to professional designers with access to better technology and experience. But for starters, these tools proved to be extremely beneficial for us to start creating professional marketing material and product related developments.

The above is not an exhaustive list of great tools available out there for design. But they do serve as good aids to kick off work. We’d love to know the ones you’ve come across in your experience which can help fellow entrepreneurs and young achievers.