Tag: creative marketer

Ponder for a moment … the iPad, Cloud computing, and Apps. A few years ago, they barely existed.  Now they’re an integral part of our lives. That swift journey from nonexistent to indispensable seems to happen a lot these days. But it gives us unlimited access to improve our learning and utility for things like utilizing awesome visual creative marketing tools through idea connection.

This makes you think:  What visual design tools were you not using two years ago that today you can’t imagine living without today?

It’s always very useful when a marketer can express themselves creatively in a way they’ve never tried before. With a tool they may not have used before, you can add discovery learning into the mix.

Check out these tools also.

The online tools that we will discuss today are great resources that will develop visual design creativity in all sorts of ways.

These are fun online visual creativity tools to explore and engage with your peers. Everyone can have fun with these. They’re perfect for adding creative touches to projects of all sorts.

Here are our favorites:

 Androidify

Wondering what you’d look like as an android? Find out with Androidify. This is an online app that uses the mascot from the Android operating system.

You can turn it into whatever you want it to look like. Use a number of different options in the interface to customize your Bot. It’s also available as an app for the Android OS from Google Play.

Visual design tools … Animoto

Animoto allows you to create professional-quality videos with pictures and video clips. There are both free and paid versions of Animoto. Pricing plans range from $8 a month for personal use to $34 a month for businesses.

Here’s how to get started with Animoto. First, sign up for a free account. You can create your free account with your Facebook profile or with your email address.

Then click the Create button to start your Animoto project.

Next, choose a style to customize the look and feel of your video. Click on the style template preview to see what your video would look like with that style.

Now you’re ready to add photos, video clips, and music. Animoto accepts photo and video uploads from your computer, smartphone, or other sources.

You can add your own song or select one from Animoto’s music catalog. Tracks available include instrumentals and songs.

Now you’ll want to personalize your video in Settings. Be sure to add a custom thumbnail, video title, and description for your video. All of this information helps with search engine optimization.

When you’re finished, you can preview your work. Click the Preview Video button to see what your video looks like. If you want to make changes, close this window and make any required edits.

Finally, you’re ready to produce your video. To do this, click Produce.

Design Wizard

Design Wizard is an excellent new graphic design tool that allows you to personalize an image or video in seconds. It holds over 1 million high-quality images and thousands of videos. The standout feature here is the magic resize button, which allows you to transform the size of an image while you are creating a design.

It also features excellent integrations with Hubspot, Marketo, Buffer, and Intercom. There is no attribution requires on any of the images in Design Wizard.”

Flame Painter

The makers of the design tool Amberlight, have a free online version of another drawing tool. It’s a visual stunner called Flame Painter. This free version lets you literally paint with fire right on the screen.

Using this tool, you can work with the full spectrum slider to create any color to paint with. You can also adjust the stroke’s focus, intensity, speed, and more.

Magisto

You can turn photos and video clips from your Android or Apple device into professionally edited movies with Magisto Video editor. This app will automatically arrange and add effects to your videos and slideshows without any extra effort, giving you a fully innovative video to share with your social networks.

Magisto has over 65 million users and has been featured on the Google Play homepage in 130 countries—so it’s a popular choice for many video editors around the world.

Picassohead

Picassohead is a unique and fun drawing tool that lets you style portraits and abstract art just like the famous artist himself.

The shapes and strokes used in this tool are extracted and duplicated from many of Picasso’s famous paintings.

Choose from a number of settings to draw, shape, scale, and color your creations. You can explore the gallery of previous work for inspirations, and save and email your work.

It appears in the Picassohead gallery for others to enjoy, and as a link for downloading and sharing your image.

Here is another tool that may be a help: Design Wizard

Replay

Replay is a video editing app made for heavy Instagram users. Turn your photos and videos into movies with seamless transitions, perfectly synced to your choice of music.

This app comes with plenty of tools and filters to edit videos from your camera roll, iCloud, or record straight from the app. Like any other app, enhance your experience and your videos with in-app purchases, like removing the watermark or adding more filters and effects.

Myoats

Myoats is an online community for creating designs using a cool online drawing application. It’s a geometric tool that creates beautifully symmetrical designs easily and quickly. Myoats lets you download images as JPEGs or transparent PNGs.

You can save your designs to the community by being a member. You can also download them straight to your computer.  It’s all free.

 Legend …  Build Custom GIFs

GIFs are 6-second videos. While there are apps that offer premade GIFs, consider customizing your own. This personalizes your brand and allows you to create unique content.

Legend is a smartphone app that allows you to create GIFs by combining text, flash, and images. You can download Legend from Google Play or the App Store.

Here’s how to use Legend to create your own branded GIFs. First, type your text. You have 100 characters to work with.

Next, choose a photo. You can take a photo using the camera on your phone, choose a photo from your photo library, or select a photo from Flickr.

Now it’s time to select your animation style. There are 18 variations to choose from, six on each screen.

When you choose your color palette, it changes the color of your photo and your text. Then tap GIF to convert your work into a GIF and tap More to save it to your camera roll.

Diffen

This online tool lets you compare virtually any two things, and then learn a whole lot about them. You may be pondering a simple decision to make about whether to drink dark roast or medium roast coffee.

Or you may be contrasting the First and Second World War for historical analysis. With Differ, you can compare pretty much anything your heart desires.

There are literally thousands of reasons why you might want to use Diffen. You’ll be amazed at what you can learn simply by asking questions. Just begin typing whatever comes into your mind in the blanks.

Bomomo

Bonomo is another free online drawing tool, similar in format to Flame Painter but with a different visual effect. There are a number of different textures that can be used..

Grafitti Playdo

This is a unique tool with a fun interface for anyone who’s a budding graffiti artist. You’re presented with a cement wall and an actual shakeable spray can do your art with.

You choose your color and brush size on the fly, and go nuts with your graffiti art.

Textorizer

This three-tool pack works best on Firefox, Chrome, and Opera OS. This is a step up from creating word clouds, and you can render some stunning and emotive work with it.

For such a simple free tool, Textorizer is pretty creative and a lot of fun. You upload images and text and then work with them using the left sidebar sliders. It actually uses three separate tools:

Textorizer 1—Uses simple word-cloud formatting to enhance picture highlights.

Textorizer 2—Places text across a whole picture and enhances colors and shapes dramatically.

Excoffizer—Produces a vector rendition of an uploaded picture and uses parallel wavy lines for texturing.

Legend …  Build Custom GIFs

GIFs are 6-second videos. While there are apps that offer premade GIFs, consider customizing your own. This personalizes your brand and allows you to create unique content.

Legend is a smartphone app that allows you to create GIFs by combining text, flash, and images. You can download Legend from Google Play or the App Store.

Here’s how to use Legend to create your own branded GIFs. First, type your text. You have 100 characters to work with.

Next, choose a photo. You can take a photo using the camera on your phone, choose a photo from your photo library, or select a photo from Flickr.

Now it’s time to select your animation style. There are 18 variations to choose from, six on each screen.

When you choose your color palette, it changes the color of your photo and your text. Then tap GIF to convert your work into a GIF and tap More to save it to your camera roll.

GoAnimate … Video Presentations

With the GoAnimate animation tool, you can create videos that are made up of template scenes, customizable characters, backgrounds, music, and props from their library. You can also upload your logo and change the colors to match your brand.

Choose a Theme

To create a video in GoAnimate, first sign up for an account and then click Make Video. Next, select your theme. You have three choices: Business Friendly, Whiteboard Animation, and Video Infographics.

Then select your template in Video Maker. Each template has a series of premade scenes with backgrounds, characters, props, and text boxes, which you can edit individually.

Choose your character by category, from holidays to kids, politics, and sports. Remember to keep your character consistent throughout each scene.

Next, select props to enhance your video storytelling. You can move props around each scene freely.

Add Scenes

Now it’s time to choose your scene. In the image below, a template scene was selected for the title slide for a video. On the right, you can modify the text. Click the Add Scene button to insert additional scenes.

Add a Voiceover

Next, you can add a voiceover to your scenes. There are two ways to do this: with dialogue or narration. Dialogue applies to characters only and comes with automatic lip-sync. Conversely, the narration is voiceover without lip-syncing.

To add a voiceover to your video, use your built-in microphone to record your voice, upload a recording, or use one of GoAnimate’s professional voiceover partners (VoiceBunny, Buyvo, and Voices).

Add Music

Who doesn’t like a little music? GoAnimate features a library of royalty-free music to choose from. Click on the music icon to audition tracks. After you choose a music track, it appears below your scene and narration rows.

What are your favorite productivity apps that you can’t live without? I would love to hears your recommendations.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:

Lessons from the Yale Customer Insights Conference

Small Business Customer Insights 101

Remarkable Marketing Using These 17 Customer Insight Techniques

A How-to Guide for Small Business Social Media Marketing

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on  Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.