Honestly, I sort of dislike everything from Adobe except for PDF and Lightroom. There are many excellent solutions out there for authors and online writers without using any desktop products like Adobe Photoshop or the like.

However, I have a few staff members whose job depends on many Adobe products. So indirectly I benefit from Adobe products. So I cannot deny Adobe’s footprint in my professional life. I just simply find their software unusually unfriendly. This is my personal opinion that even people in my company do not share.

But as an online writer, I often need to create custom graphics for presentation or merely a header for a post. In this case, my go-to software includes are:

• Diagrams.net — for engineering drawing to org charts
• Canva — for presentation slides to header graphics to business cards to logo creation!

Diagrams.net (used to be Draw.io)

This is an excellent free tool for drawing flow charts, system diagrams to org charts.

Canva

This is my most favorite graphics program of all time. It allows me to create good-enough to great graphics for a presentation to article headers. In recent days, they have added support for video and animation, which means it is even more useful in creating attractive graphics for an article header image. I like Canva for its simplicity.

Using Canva is as simple as using any presentation software such as Google Docs or Keynotes, or dare I say Microsoft Powerpoint.

Here are some header graphics I created for recent posts on Voice.com. Each of them took anywhere from 1–5 minutes at the most.

Here is another one:

What to try Canva for Free?

You try Canva for free for 14-days via the following link:

https://mediumauthor.com/canva

Note: my company has a new startup called the LandingPage.Pink — a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that will offer free landing pages for Medium authors very soon. To offset this free service, we decided to partner with a few awesome vendors with great software products to recommend to authors via our production recommendation inside our tool. The above link is part of that effort. You can always go to canva.com directly as well.

If you have any Diagrams.net or Canva questions, please feel free to ask in the comments section below.

Jazz up your next article with a header graphic that looks great and made custom by you with 1–5 minutes of your time. This is way better than just using a random image from Pixabay or Unsplash.