A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes designing, creating, and adapting one takes a lot of work. Especially if you're not a designer. And even more so if you're short on budget.
For these cases, there are a multitude of tools, apps, and websites with graphic resources that can give your projects that visual touch, without giving up. And they're all free. Here's a selection.
Some free graphic resources for non-designers1. Image websites
Forget about downloading photos from Google Images: just because an image is uploaded to the Internet doesn't mean you can use it freely . The alternative: turn to free image platforms, respecting the transfer and attribution requirements that each one establishes. One of my favorites is FreeDigitalPhotos : it has a wide catalog of photos and illustrations that you can download for free and without registration, up to a size of 400 x 300 pixels (this is where the photo that telegram data opens this post comes from). Other options are Dreamstime (with 19 million photos, although not all of them are free, and always subject to registration), ImageAfter (with high-resolution textures), and FreeFoto (with images organized by theme and location).
Designing a good infographic isn't easy: it requires careful data selection, synthesis, and knowing how to represent concepts . But if you're brave enough, Piktochart offers free templates with pre-designed images and dynamic maps that you can modify to your liking. Easel.ly also provides a wide variety of fonts and shapes, and Infogr.am offers a wide range of options for different types of charts, with the option to import data.
And analyze the most frequently used terms in a document, illustrate a presentation, or represent concepts . With Image Chef, you can shape your word cloud to take on the symbol of your choice, and with the colors and fonts you want. Wordle creates your word cloud from a text or website URL, and with Tagxedo , you can also generate the cloud from a Twitter user's tweets and give it more than 40 different shapes.