The best free thumbnail maker
We know that for a lot of places, the big graphic design software packages are far too expensive for making a couple of pictures a month; and they can be quite scary to get to grips with too.
In this #STMBlog, we’ll be looking at, in our opinion, the best free thumbnail makers available.
Buckle up and get your designing hats on!
Canva
Canva is a great free service where you can create more or less anything graphically. Thumbnails, Instagram stories, business cards, pictures for social media; just about anything. There’s no complicated sign up process or having to enter your card details for a free service, it’s essentially click and go.
If you aren’t that confident with designing, you can use one of their templates to start. From here you can add/remove elements within the image. If you’re confident, you could use a blank Canvas and start from scratch.
There’s lots of features on the left hand side of the edit screen, where you can upload photos, edit the text, choose whatever font or style you’re looking for and more!
Everything is customisable within this section and it all saves under your account templates and you can access them whenever you want to.
You can easily pop in a predesigned graphic, either by clicking or dragging and dropping. You can rotate it, resize it, scale it, crop it, flip it, twist it, bop it! ©.
If you want to part with a little extra cash to unlock premium features, like more complex graphics, you can part with a few quid a month. But as per the blog name, that wouldn’t make it the best free thumbnail maker. Free being the key word. If you want to pay, that’s on you. Stone’s Throw Media will accept no liability in this regard and we don’t have lawyers so good luck taking us to court.
PicMonkey
Another free thumbnail maker which gets the STM seal of approval is PicMonkey.
Just like Canva, you can customise the elements within the project and access it whenever you can sign in.
There’s a huge amount of categories within PicMonkey. You can choose from the theme which social media channel your graphic will feature on.
Once you’ve signed up, you can access templates and change literally anything in them, from textures, effects, touch up frames, text and more. You can resize it and add images directly from different sources.
Similar to something like Photoshop, PicMonkey shows you the layers of what you’re working on. This allows you to see what’s where, move it into the background or foreground and edit the layers in a slightly more visual way to Canva.
You can add pages into a project on PicMonkey and even create folders. One folder might be Instagram images, another might be YouTube thumbnails.
You can also create a series, so you’ve basically got your own thumbnail that you can tweak as necessary. If you have an employee of the month, you can just change the picture of the person on the template for example. Simples!
Conclusion
The best free thumbnail maker is down to your personal opinion. If you prefer the interface of Canva, use Canva, and the same applies to PicMonkey. They’re very similar in terms of what they offer and both cost absolutely nowt.
They’re both very useful tools for promotion of your video content, or just graphics for your social media in general!
Ultimately, if you want maximum control and creative options, the likes of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop will be two of the best routes, but the above options are helpful if you’re looking for quick results, or don’t have the skills to make thumbnails yourself. A free thumbnail maker will never be as advanced as the paid graphic design options, of course, but there’s some really good platforms available.
If you’ve got any questions about free thumbnail makers, what makes a good thumbnail, why thumbnails are important, or why your cuticles aren’t in tiptop shape on your actual thumbnails, give us a call today or drop us a line!
Thank you for taking the time to read our blog on free thumbnail makers, why not check out these great resources while you’re here?
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