I am a graphic designer. Really, which software do you use? Canva. (screaming) Isn't that just hilarious? The joke here is that if you use Canva you're not a real graphic designer. Wow! Adobe good, Canva bad. Why Canva bad? Because Adobe is the industry standard. Why is Adobe the industry standard? Because Adobe is the industry standard, no further questions. But is Canva really that bad? What about Affinity? What about Microsoft Publisher? Do I really need to spend 80
Australian dollars a month on a program that crashes
on me with every new update when I could just spend that
money on iced lattes instead? I saw this video by the channel Emeral. Go give it a watch, it's
in the bio, it's fantastic. While watching, I realized
that the game design and graphic design industries
are shockingly similar. They both offer an
abundance of program choices and even more of an abundance of opinions on which program is the best. So I'm gonna design a poster in every single program I
can get my greedy hands on and finally decide which
program takes the crown. My name is Elliot, and what we are doing is
what I just described, that was the intro, that is what we- I downloaded an absurd amount
of programs for this video. I straight up downloaded a virus while trying to download
GIMP, GIMP of all programs. The old Elliot would
just click on any link that said "download" on any old website. The new Elliot however, the new Elliot uses
NordVPN, today's sponsor. Every time I download a font,
texture pack or design program NordVPN's Threat Protection warns me if that free high
res crumpled paper texture was really too good to be true
before I even hit download. The internet can be a
scary place sometimes, but it's filled with resources that us graphic designers can
use to enhance our designs. So now I can take away the scary and double down on the graphic design, and that's really cool. Also, living in the land down under means I get like one percent of the streaming service libraries that the rest of the world gets. How am I meant to stay on
top of the biggest TV shows when the TV show isn't even
available in my region? Thankfully NordVPN also gives me access to all of my favorite content no matter where I am in the world. No more region locked mumbo jumbo. I am now everywhere in
the world at the same time and I didn't even have to pay three grand for a flight to JFK. I've got a special deal for
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30 day money back guarantee. That's NordVPN.com/ElliotVPN. Two L's, one T, that is
how you spell my name. Adobe Photoshop is my bread and butter, so it seemed only fitting to start here. This would be the blueprint, the poster that the following posters would look to replicate. I ended up with a simple
text and frame poster with a few small touches to
complete the composition. I figured making the exact
same poster in every program would not only be boring
for you but for me as well, so I decided that the header text would be the name of the program, and the frame would be a graphic design entirely using whatever features
the program could offer me. In the case of Photoshop, this was one of my classic
Elliot gradient warps, a cheeky homage to the first video I uploaded on this channel. I started with some layers
of paintbrush colors and then experimented with the warp tool, noise filter, and blending modes to get a design I was happy with. How am I gonna do this in Canva? Photoshop is great. I didn't learn illustrator for years because of how good Photoshop is. If you spend enough time in it you can pretty much design
anything any other program can. I'm also really biased towards it and generally a stubborn person. (light music) The world hadn't seen anything like Canva before it was founded, I think. I'm pretty sure it was the first online template based
design program, I think. A lot of the programs I'll be designing with later in the video are clearly inspired by
Canva's revolutionary model. Accessible, free, and filled with assets, these programs threw out the intimidation of the blank canvas, and immediately lowered the
barrier of entry to design. This is a good thing. I really like Canva, and I think it gets too
much hate for no reason. But it definitely feels less taboo than it did a few years back. I mean, it's free, that's great. I've used Canva a few times in the past so I found it easy to pick up again, with the only main challenge
being the feature graphic. Here we go, aura energy
backgrounds, how bout this? I kind of feel like I'm cheating this. The program obviously has its limitations. It was never intended to offer its users the ability to design
completely from scratch and instead offers templates
and assets aplenty. These are some good fonts,
a fine selection in general. So I threw together a
couple of gradient blobs layered with different blending modes and got a result that
felt somewhat unique. Pretty happy with how it turned out. ♪ Been spending most our lives
living in a Canva paradise ♪ Okay hear me out for a second. If you took two buckets and labeled them Adobe and Canva, you could separate every program I will mention in this video
into those two buckets. The Adobe bucket will be blank canvas, hard to master, flexible programs. And the Canva bucket will be
filled with template-built, stock asset abundant,
cloud-based programs. These are two very different buckets and they serve very different purposes. And I think it's important to
distinguish between the two. It feels silly to compare
Photoshop and Canva when they offer such different
things for designers. So I'll try and compare Adobe
programs to similar programs and Canva with other cloud-based
programs as we go on. It's something to think about
going forward into this video, or maybe not, I really don't know. I'm just trying to sound smart. Illustrator is a vector
based design program under the Adobe creative cloud umbrella. We love this program. This is the graphic
designers graphic design. What? Unlike Photoshop, a raster-based program, you can scale pretty much
anything in Illustrator to be as big or as small as you
want without losing quality. That's what vector means. Perfect for logo design
and other types of design that I can't think of, but
definitely logo design. I've learned to love
Illustrator over the years. I don't really need to design with vectors since most of my work gets uploaded online where it is compressed
to hell and back anyway. But the program is definitely
made for graphic design. With the amount of Illustrator
tips posted everywhere, I feel like I will never truly understand the power of this software, it is deep. I used the gradient mesh tool
to create the feature graphic for this poster. Not my favorite tool in the world, but it gives you a lot more
options for customization than doing it all rasterized. You can individually change
the color of each little node while maintaining the rest of the image. God that looks really
nice, look at that texture, that's a sandstone texture. The rest of the composition
was easy as expected. CorelDRAW is a vector based design program that is widely considered to be a premier graphic design software. I unfortunately have no
clue how to use CorelDRAW. I'm so used to Adobe layouts and shortcuts that some of these programs were so much more difficult
than they needed to be. Like CorelDRAW looks familiar at a glance, but I was lost immediately. I'm starting to think this
video was a terrible idea. It's a free trial, I lose
access to CorelDRAW in 16 days. I can definitely see the
potential of CorelDRAW. And I might've had more luck trying the Photoshop
alternative, CorelPhotoPaint. But yeah it just didn't click for me. The main graphic is a bit of a mess, but I had some fun experimenting with all the different brushes it offers. Microsoft Excel is a- hang on, this isn't a graphic design program- Oh wait, hang on, yep oh yep I forgot, I forgot this was an Elliot video. Oh that's funny. You know those two buckets
I was mentioning before, the Adobe and the Canva one? Well there's a third bucket
that I forgot to mention, the silly bucket. I think this'll make for a more
interesting and funny video- Microsoft Excel is a design
program for spreadsheets and other math things. I have friends who use it
to track weekly expenses and other math things. I only just learned how
to calculate the sum of a column of numbers
in Excel the other day, among other math things. But Excel has quite a few
design tools on offer. You can fill in and merge
cells to create blocks of color and get a general sense of composition. It actually looks like
we can import 3D models directly into this graph here. So I've gone ahead and added this emoji. And then I can actually rotate that around which is genuinely amazing to me. "Thank you for including
Excel in this video Elliot, "I was very curious." That's what you say and I say,
"no worries, you're welcome." Pixlr is a cloud-based
image editing software that has a bunch of
different tools to offer. I used Pixlr X to make this design which seems to be the
most fleshed out tool. Pixlr works just fine. It's definitely got a focus on using existing templates and assets, but has some nice built-in
effects that caught my eye. I also appreciate the layers panel, and ability to hide layers,
a surprisingly rare feature in the cloud-based design program world. The main graphic is nothing too fancy, it's a bunch of stock shapes and patterns layered on top of each other. I don't know, it works. I added a bit of noise and
liquified it a little too to give it something extra. I've heard this one is a fan favorite, my computer fan that is, because
it's a- it's a cloud pro- it's not hosted on my computer
it hosted on a server-. GIMP is a free and open
source raster graphics editor. It's a popular alternative to Adobe, it's been around for ages, and you don't have to
pay a dime to get it. Pretty sweet deal, but boy oh boy is it a
different kinda beast. I sadly did not enjoy working in GIMP. I think if GIMP is all you know you could definitely learn to master it and make some quality stuff. It's just a bit tricky is all, and by tricky I mean
I was completely lost. And is "R" Rotate? No it's Rectangle Select of course it is. The main graphic is a few built in stamps overlaid with different blending modes. I also made sure to include the GIMP dog, god I love that dog. Inkscape is an open source
vector based design program that absolutely blew me away. I had never heard of Inkscape until I started making this video, and I cannot stop talking about it. It has all the best parts of Illustrator with what feels like a
bunch of improvements too, and a little bit of
Photoshop thrown in for fun. This is a free program,
it's literally free. The main graphic was
made with a gradient mesh much like the one I did in Illustrator, but the tool feels just so much smoother. It just felt right, I don't know. How about it? Okay. Obviously this was only one use case, so maybe there are some downfalls, maybe it's not that good at logo design, maybe it crashes a lot,
maybe it's not actually free and I was just using a seven day trial. But at the moment I could
not recommend Inkscape more. A fantastic program to start
your design journey with, seriously it's really good. It feels like the Blender
of graphic design. Blender is an open source
desktop 3D design program. But did you know it can do
more than just 3D design? Did you know you can even
use it as a video editor? What the fuck? I think that is awesome, and I wanted to make a
poster with it so I did. I really have no idea
what I'm doing right now. I used the Blender monkey
head as the feature graphic and then threw a bunch of
light and materials at it to make it look as 2D as possible. It actually worked, and I think this is the
future of graphic design. Figma is a cloud-based design tool with a focus on collaborative design work and is currently in the process of being acquired by Adobe
for 20 billion dollars, 20 billion dollars. Can you imagine how many iced lattes I could buy with that money? 20 billion dollars worth. Read that again. Figma very much feels like
the future of design software. Its collaborative tools are unmatched, and the amount of TikToks and Reels I see of people making absurdly
detailed graphics and prototypes keeps impressing me with the
potential of the program. It's currently free, and
hopefully stays free, but in this economy who bloody knows? This poster was super easy to make. Figma has some fantastic gradient tools that made the main graphic a breeze. And I used a noise plug-in to get some noise texture going on. Love all the plug-ins, big fan of Figma. Sketch is both a Mac app for designers and a web app for viewers
of the Mac designed designs. Unfortunately I'm not a Mac user, and since I am also a
designer in this situation, I could not design anything. But it looks a lot like Figma
and has a pretty sick website. I also like how you can
design stuff in the app and then have it immediately available for anyone with access to
the internet, that's cool. Scribus is an open-source
desktop publishing software. The website was down and
had been down for a week. I was not able to download Scribus. I made a poster in MS Paint. Yeah this was awesome, this
was awesome, this was great. Let's export it. - [Computer] Five, four, three, two, one. (upbeat music) Here we go, now we're talking. I spent an hour immersed in KidPix. This was my childhood and I imagine for a lot of
you watching, it was too. But is it a viable graphic design tool? That's what we're gonna answer today. From now on I swear to only use programs with an
undo tool that says "nuh uh". - [Computer] My bad. - A brush that sends off
millions of Zoombinis in unpredictable directions. My heart. And the ability to
export your design in 3D, blue-red glasses 3D that is. This is design thinking. Imagine if Photoshop had that tool. You've got like the worst feedback you've ever heard in your life, and they want you to completely change it. And you just need something
that'll make you feel better and you just go- (beautiful, serene music) That would solve all of my problems. Welcome to what has become the
number one Adobe alternative. If you asked designers who use Adobe to recommend a cheaper
but similar program, I think most of them
will recommend Affinity. How many of them have
actually tried Affinity? I don't think very many at all. This was the program I
was most keen on trying. Does it really walk the talk? Is this the Adobe killer? Is it good? Yes, it is, it's excellent. I very much enjoyed using Affinity. If you've used Adobe programs
you'll feel right at home. A lot of the keyboard
shortcuts are the same which is very nice. I was using Affinity designer, the Illustrator clone of sorts, and found it very easy to pick up. I made the feature graphic by layering some soft brushes
with different blending modes and then played around with its surprisingly deep hue and saturation tool. Overall, huge fan of Affinity. I could see myself making the switch and saving a lot of money. It also just feels like
it cares about me more, does that make sense? Like I didn't even have to
input my credit card details when downloading the free trial. In fact, none of the free
trials I've downloaded so far have required me to
put in my card details. Only Adobe requires that. Isn't that funny? I also imagine the Photoshop
and InDesign alternatives Affinity Photo and Publisher,
are similar in quality. Give Affinity a try. My brain is so Adobe-coded that I feel bad for some
reason for using Affinity, like I'm not a real designer. How sad is that? It's $260 Australian for all of Affinity, a one off payment. That's like three months
of what I pay for Adobe. Do you know how many iced lattes- PicMonkey is a cloud-based photo editing and graphic design platform that has nothing to do with monkeys. This realization devastated me. What separates PicMonkey from the other cloud-based competition is that it is under the Shutterstock name. That means that if you have a paid plan you get access to the
Shutterstock stock image library. This is a big deal - I think. Stock imagery you can
make or break a design. And having access to the
Shutterstock library, I mean I see the Shutterstock
watermark everywhere, so I can only imagine
that is a big library. PicMonkey also has a texture tab with a bunch of, you guessed
it, Shutterstock textures. That's actually kinda cool. And then you can just go in with the blend modes and everything. Wow. I am a huge fan of this feature. Everyone wants to make their graphics a little bit crunchier, and the texture tab gives you that power with just one click. Very innovative. When the computers die
what will we design with? I have always been a forward thinker, and nothing brings me more joy than designing on the tabula rasa, paper. I didn't have any loose
paper in my apartment so I had to tear a page out of a notebook. I used these Posca
markers I bought ages ago, and that was fun. I can't draw to save myself, so this was a pleasant surprise. Adobe InDesign is a
desktop publishing software used to create print and digital media materials like posters. I'm a big fan of InDesign, and if used for the right
purpose it is fantastic. Any time I have to make
something that will be a PDF, I use InDesign. It feels very different
to other Adobe programs. I think due to the specific
purpose it seeks to fulfill, but once you get the hang of
how it works it works great. Also master pages are amazing, and I wish they had them in Illustrator. It doesn't have too many tools
for organic image generation So the main graphic was
a bit tricky to make. But ended up going with a simple gradient overlay design that looks pretty cool. The rest of the poster
was no problem at all. I know a few poster designers
who exclusively use InDesign, and you can make some really cool stuff, I just don't think it offers much for me. It is a good program though,
it is a very good program. QuarkXPress is a desktop
publishing software for creating and editing
complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG environment. WYDIWYG of course is an abbreviation for "what you see is what you get." Is this like an American thing? I've never heard of WYSIWYG in my life. QuarkXPress is the definition
of corporate design. It's pretty much an InDesign alternative. It's built for print and physical media with a very similar toolset. Also you have to request
a seven day free trial. And when requesting, you have to list your company's revenue. I was given access within the hour. I thanked god for this amazing opportunity I'd been blessed with. I could finally access QuarkXPress and start designing in
a WYSIWYG environment I also received two follow-up
emails within 24 hours, a LinkedIn connection, and a phone call, asking me if I needed
help learning the program. - [Man On Phone] We're contacting you in regards to the free trial that you- - Their sales team simply goes too hard. And turns out you can't even publish anything you make in the free trial so I can't even show you what I made. I do not understand this software and it is absolutely not targeted at Instagram content creators. I want to put this one
in the silly bucket. Do you know how to, what do you know? - Not much. - Okay. - Is that the font that we want? - We can use that font,
that font's really nice. - Okay, don't you feel like
that looks really cool? - Yeah yeah you wanna use that one? - Yeah why not? Very intuitive. - Can you make a square for-
- Ah! Now I'm gonna hold down shift. - Nice.
- Just like PowerPoint - What's your vision for this one. - Comic book gradient. Andy Warhol. Oh yeah this is exactly what I wanted. - Here we go.
- Okay (laughing) Ooooo, oooooo! We're just gonna work
with this layer for now. - Yep
- Alright - Convert to smart object. Smart object for a smart guy.
- Okay Gaussian Blur isn't this what you do? - I usually do that. - Then we'll do the- we'll avoid it. Ooooo! I'm happy with this but
it needs something more. - What does it need? Yeah there we go. - Oh no. That is incredible.
- That's great. That's great.
- That's done. - That's it? - Hands off. This is the best thing
I've made on Photoshop. So when I wear headphones,
Bose headphones in particular, I get a dent in my head. - Oh really? - I get a dent. (Elliot laughs) - Welcome to Microsoft
Office's forgotten sibling. Publisher is a desktop design program that I honestly think hasn't
been updated in 10 years. It was also the first
design program I ever used, fun fact about me. This will be very interesting. You can't do much in this, so let's see. This was a real challenge to use. It feels just like Microsoft Word, like I'm almost certain you could make everything in Publisher in Word. But Word isn't a graphic design program, so I'm gonna pretend
like it doesn't exist. The title was made thanks
to some word art presets that still hold up to this day. You can never go wrong with word art. I used a bunch of preset
shapes and gradients to make up most of the main graphic, with the only extra assets being some preset newspaper ad blocks. I think they really tie it
all together, don't you? This design has given me a headache, I am going to resume designing
tomorrow, lord help me. Photopea is a free to use
online Photoshop clone, and boy is it solid. Apart from being pretty
slow to use, which is fair, it has all the capabilities of a program like Photoshop and it's free. What I'm not used to is the game ads. I didn't realize that
the creators of Photopea had made so many games. Noooo. Ohhhh! I love Photopea and I am
very thankful it exists. I made the feature graphic in the exact same way I did in Photoshop and I love the results. Photopea is a great way to get
into photo editing software, and it's just a lot of
fun to play around with. Shout out to Photopea,
thank you for everything, I love you. Adobe Express is a mobile design tool. That means you use it
on your mobile phone. Has technology gone too far? And what is a mobile phone? I designed a whole post for
my Instagram page on Express while seated on the SkyBus
from Tullamarine Airport once. Does anyone get that reference? Adobe Express is very deep
for a mobile application. It feels kinda like a compressed version of both Photoshop and
Canva, and it's a nice mix. You can' do everything in Express but you can do a lot of things and you can do them Express-ly. Hahaha! I think PowerPoint is the most capable design software in the
Microsoft Office suite. You can definitely design with it. I also don't think you understand how much I love the 3D stock library. Here we go, it's a lovely scene between this chipmunk and my self portrait that I made in Blender
that I exported to here. But the eyes, none of the materials, I don't know how to sort out the materials so I had to add on these extra eyes that were on the 3D thing. Looks good. Here are a few Canva-like programs that are all very similar. So I'm going to rush through them. Piktochart is an online platform that I think is mainly
made for infographics based on the maps tab it offers It also has the word "chart" in the name. It is a perfectly fine
template based design tool. It also has no layers tab. The main graphic is more stock assets overlaid on top of each other. We do what we can, WDWWC. VistaCreate formerly known as Crello is a web only template
based design program that operates under the
Vistaprint umbrella. It's a pretty solid program. I really like how the
main graphic turned out. It's once again stock
assets and blending modes. But I particularly liked
the assets on offer. No layers panel once again
though, absolutely threw me. PosterMyWall is another online platform, but this one has the word "poster" in it so I was excited to give it a try because it has the word "poster" in it. Unfortunately it didn't offer me much. I think out of all the online design tools I liked this one the least. It just feels outdated and slow which I think may be objectively true. The main graphic is just terrible and I wanna apologize
to you for making it. The QR code just goes to my
YouTube channel by the way. You can put your phone down. Why make posters for Instagram in programs that aren't Instagram? It makes literally no sense, when Instagram has one of
the deepest design tools available on the market. I used a poll sticker as the main graphic. Minecraft is an intricate
desktop design program disguised as a video game. Similar to Photoshop and Illustrator, you can make things in Minecraft. It also has an expansive
stock asset library much like Canva and Pixlr in
the form of the painting block. Okay here's my finished poster. (horn plays) Uhhhh- Let's go right ahead and
put Minecraft in S tier for this list of design programs. Wow Elliot, that was a lot of programs, I hope you don't have
any more up your sleeve. (mischievous clarinet sting) Some final thoughts for you. What I learned while filming this video is that there are many
capable design programs that could easily replace the Adobe suite I'm so comfortable with. Will I make the change though? Probably not. It took me four years of Photoshop to start using Illustrator, so unfortunately I'm pretty stubborn when it comes to the
programs I design with. But if I quietly started designing
with Inkscape or Affinity I really don't think people would notice. Design with the program
that works best for you and you'll be able to design
anything you want soon enough. Now obviously you probably shouldn't be designing a logo for
a client in PicMonkey or a raster-based software. Or maybe you're just like me and you turn down every
logo client you receive because you're just too
scared, and that's fine too. If you're sick of paying Adobe rent, give something else a try. I promise you you'll be surprised at how easy some of these
programs are to pick up. And if none of these programs wok for you then just do what I did
and go get a twin brother and get him to do it all for you. You can't lose in that outcome. And I'm also now realizing I never actually crowned the
software I think is best, so I guess if we're going by each bucket I would say Inkscape and Affinity are tied for the blank slate bucket, while Canva probably still takes the crown of the Canva bucket. And then the silly bucket winner would probably go to QuarkXPress. Hope this video gave you a
new and exciting perspective on design software. I also hope you had a silly little laugh. And I also hope to see you next time for some more fun Elliot wacky-ness. I'm just so silly and funny. I can't help it while making these videos. And finally, another big
thank you to NordVPN. Don't forget to give it a try. You get a 30 day money back guarantee. Just go to NordVPN.com/ElliotVPN
to try it out. Oh no, I think I can smell smoke. I think my cake is burning in the oven. Sorry guys, I gotta go, but
I'll see you in the next video. Have a good one, see ya. So the reason I said the cake was burning is 'cause I was meant to
now go over to the oven, pull out a cake, and on the cake in icing
was another poster, and that would've been the final joke. But I just can't do that now, I don't know why, I just cannot
find the effort to do that. I'm so, I've worked on this
video for too long now. So I hope you understand
that's what it could've been. But I really do appreciate you watching, and I hope you enjoyed the video. What video will you watch next on your suggested video list? We don't need to talk about it. All right, I hope you had a good day.
