The Best Design Tools for Beginners and Businesses

When people ask me what tools they should start with as a new designer or a small business owner trying to improve their visual presence, I could give them a long list. But the honest answer, the one I always end up circling back to, is Figma. This is a love letter to the platforms that shape my everyday workflow, but Figma sits at the heart of it, both as my creative home and the place I recommend anyone begins.

A love letter to Figma

I grew up as a baby designer inside the world of web and app design, and Figma raised me. It’s vector-based, endlessly scalable and liberating in a way that other platforms never quite managed. If you want to moodboard, prototype, illustrate, build brand kits or create complex design systems, Figma holds all of it without breaking a sweat. And for someone like me, who thinks like a developer (you never really shake your roots), its component-driven mindset feels like second nature. Consistency comes first, digital optimisation comes second, and Figma fits perfectly into that way of thinking.

More recently, I’ve been working with Figma’s drawing tools to create digital illustrations that look hand-drawn but export as clean, crisp vectors. It’s the best of both worlds. I can make something warm and characterful without worrying that it’ll go fuzzy at scale. A quick tip here: if you’re exporting illustrations, always flatten similar vectors, like outlines or colour blocks. It keeps your file sizes reasonable and your sanity intact.

But the biggest reason I recommend Figma is simple. It’s free. It works beautifully as a desktop app. I can share a link with a client and they can view the work instantly without downloading a thing. Even complete beginners can navigate, comment, export and prototype with surprising confidence. Sure, it takes real time to master the deeper features, but for the essentials, it’s intuitive in a way that genuinely empowers people. Compare that with great-aunt Adobe, who has become increasingly complicated, increasingly expensive and increasingly detached from the simplicity that made designers love it in the first place.

The Magic of Clickable Prototypes

Clickable prototypes deserve their own mention. I can present a functioning journey for a website or an app without touching a code editor. Coming from a software agency background, I know how expensive development time is. Being able to show the full experience upfront, refine it, test it and clarify user journeys before the build begins is priceless. It saves time, money and a lot of potential frustration. It’s also one of the best tools I have for communicating interaction design to developers. It closes the gap between idea and execution beautifully.

Where Adobe Still Has Its Place

Adobe has been the industry giant for four decades. I respect it deeply. Illustrator remains unmatched for print work and complex typesetting. But I can’t deny that every time I open an Adobe product, something has changed and I’m back on YouTube searching for a tutorial just to complete a basic task. Photoshop purists will always defend it, and yes, it’s brilliant for photography, but it’s simply not built for graphic design. The file sizes are enormous, assets always seem pixelated no matter how high-res they are, and exporting one illustration can add seconds to your website loading time. That’s a lifetime in UX terms.

The only thing I consistently used Photoshop for was mockups. And to be fair, Photoshop mockup files are everywhere and unbelievably useful. If you want to show a product in context, it’s a goldmine. But Canva mockups are now good enough for most use-cases, and far easier to work with. And when I want something very specific, Gemini (yes, the nana banana version) has become a surprisingly reliable solution. If you include dimensions or aspect ratio in your prompt, you’ll save yourself a world of pain.

Canva: The Tool I Recommend to Every Business Owner

Canva is controversial among designers, but I love it. Not as a vector tool, not for illustration, not for crafting brand assets from scratch, but as a design playground for non-designers. It’s intuitive, visual and experiment-friendly. You can drag, drop, tweak and discover.

One of my favourite uses for Canva is setting up brand kits for clients. We take their style guide and embed it directly into Canva: typography, colour palettes, logo variants, illustrations, layouts and even tone of voice notes. Suddenly they have a safe, guard-railed environment where they can create social content without derailing their brand consistency. We often include a training walkthrough during handover, depending on how hands-on they want to be. For startup teams with limited time, it’s transformative.

The Tools That Keep Our Studio Running

For project organisation, we live inside Notion. We use it for sales, project management, marketing, planning and the everyday operations that keep the studio moving. We open Notion every day without fail.

For file storage and asset management, we rely on Google Drive. Google Docs, Sheets, Meet, Calendar, Gmail, the whole ecosystem. Ash and I share a drive for every client project, and it’s the cleanest, most accessible way to hand over exported brand assets. It means both sides always maintain access and we can add or update files at any time.

Finding Inspiration: Go Further Than the Obvious

I’ve never believed that inspiration should only come from design. The best ideas come from art, history, culture, psychology, film, architecture, textile design, early advertising, scientific diagrams, old signage, bookshops, conversations, everywhere. Understanding the origins of a visual style helps you deconstruct it and rebuild it into something new.

Pinterest is brilliant for quick moodboards, but don’t search for the literal result. Search for the world around your idea. Instead of "leaf logo design", try "forest trails", "macro photography", "botanical prints", "heritage apothecary design", "wildflower studies". Find the themes and emotions behind the brand, not just the aesthetic.

Aim to find things that aren’t right for your project too. Ask yourself why they don’t work. What’s missing? What feels off? What unexpected detail could be repurposed? Self-interrogation is the difference between a good designer and a great one, and it’s something I’m still refining.

For digital inspiration, Dribbble is helpful for UI patterns, but remember you’re looking at other designers’ highlight reels. Awwwards is my favourite place to explore standout websites and see how brands push their personality to the surface. The Inspiration Grid is another great resource for seeing how traditional art influences modern design.

And don’t underestimate social media. Following designers, illustrators and studios you admire will quickly fill your feed with real work and real advice. It’s one of the most immediate ways to keep your eye trained.

The AI Tools We’re Testing

We’ll write a full blog on this soon, but for now, we bounce between ChatGPT and Grok for idea generation and formalising internal documents. For visual concepts and mockups, Gemini Nano Banana (whatever name they land on) has saved me hundreds of hours. It’s especially good when you already have a flat design and a clear description of the context you want.

Keep Expanding Your Toolkit

My design toolkit is constantly evolving and I expect it always will. New tools, new workflows, new approaches. The worst thing you can do in this industry is stand still.

And if anyone has a go-to source for genuinely high-quality free licensed fonts, please, I’m all ears.