Adding visual content to your online meetings is a great way to keep participants engaged and interested. Far too often it can be difficult to find the right stock image, slide design or font to customize your presentation with traditional tools. Instead, using online (and often free) visual creation tools is a great alternative to design those custom visuals.
Check out these three tools that can help you customize and create engaging visuals for your next online meeting:
Custom graphics: Looking for an easy way to grab your audiences’ attention during online meetings? Canva is a free online tool that creates designs for Web or print. This tool gives you all the elements you need to create custom graphics for your blog posts, online meetings and presentations, social media profiles, flyers, posters, invitations and more.
Canva has a very user-friendly interface which is accessible both on a desktop and on an iPad. During the creation process you’ll be able to drag and drop images—either uploaded by you, or one of Canva’s free and premium images—into the design template. You can also edit these pictures by adjusting brightness, contrast or filters. Need to add creative font to the image? Canva has thousands of fonts that aren’t available in traditional design tools like PowerPoint or Word.
If you’re not sure where to start with creating the perfect visual for your next online meeting, Canva offers easy-to-follow tutorials in its “design school”. You can also see what other users are creating to spark your creative mind. Once you’ve created your masterpiece, you’ll be able to download and save the files to your computer so you can easily access them for your online meeting.
Infographic: Infographics are also a great way to engage your audience during online meetings. If you’re in need of an infographic and don’t want to pay a third party to create it, try Easel.ly. The online tool features thousands of free templates and design objects to create a completely customized infographic.
The site is easy to use with drag and drop elements, an extensive library of premade templates and the ability to upload your own graphics for backgrounds. The design tool features “vhemes” or pre-designed themes and objects like icons, shapes, text and charts. So, if you’re feeling creative, you have the ability to completely customize an infographic for your online meeting.
When you’ve finished your infographic, you can either save your design online for future edits or download your creation to your computer as a low or high quality jpeg, or as a PDF.
Simple graphics with text: Incorporating simple graphics into online meetings can clarify key takeaways while boosting audience engagement. If you’re looking for a simple tool to create a graphic with text for your online meetings, try the Over app available on iTunes and Google Play. This tool is strictly mobile, and doesn’t feature as many tools as the previously mentioned online tools, but if you’re constantly on the go and need to create something quickly for an online meeting, this is a great alternative.
Over lets you choose from photos or graphics from a variety of artists and gives you the ability to add unique text or icons. In the app you can size, rotate, fade, center and copy your artwork and text. When you’re done you have the ability to save your image to your camera roll. While this tool is not necessarily ideal for large-scale visual design, it’s great for mobile workers who need to create engaging visuals.
Now that you have some great, easy-to-use tools for creating a visually stimulating graphic for your next online presentation, why not try them out with an online meeting tool? Try PGi’s iMeet free for 30 days and see how easy it is to share presentations, graphics or infographics with colleagues, partners and clients.
