Top 10 'Brand-Kit-Building' Design Tools to start for Non-Designer Founders on a Shoestring Budget
So, you have a game-changing idea. You’ve mapped out your business plan, identified your target audience, and you're ready to take on the world. But then you hit a wall, and it’s painted in a color you’re not even sure has a name. That wall is 'branding'. For a non-designer founder, especially one on a tight budget, the world of logos, color palettes, and typography can feel like an exclusive club with a high-priced membership.
Let's be clear: a strong, consistent brand is not a "nice-to-have." It's a necessity. It’s the visual handshake you give your customers before you ever say a word. It builds trust, communicates your value, and makes you memorable in a crowded market. The good news? You don't need to hire a pricey agency or have a degree in graphic design to build a professional-looking brand kit from the ground up. The secret is knowing which tools to use.
Think of this list as your personal design toolbox. I've curated the top 10 brand-kit-building tools that are perfect for founders who are more comfortable with spreadsheets than style guides. They are intuitive, powerful, and most importantly, they have free or incredibly affordable options to get you started. Let's dive in and build that brand.
1. Canva: The All-in-One Design Powerhouse
If you haven’t heard of Canva, you're in for a treat. It’s the undisputed champion for non-designers, and for good reason. It’s an incredibly intuitive, browser-based design tool that uses a drag-and-drop interface to create everything from social media posts and business cards to presentations and reports. For a founder, it’s a one-stop-shop for 90% of your daily design needs.
The real magic for brand-building, however, is the "Brand Kit" feature (available on the affordable Pro plan). This allows you to upload your logo, define your exact brand colors, and set your brand fonts. Once set up, every new design you create can be instantly customized with your brand's look and feel with a single click. No more hunting for hex codes or trying to remember which font you used last week. This feature alone is a massive time-saver and the ultimate key to maintaining visual consistency.
Pro Tip: Even on the free plan, you can start building your brand. Manually create a document that lists your color hex codes and font names. When you start a new design, use that document as your reference. Start with Canva’s templates—they’re a great foundation—but always swap out the colors, fonts, and images to make the design uniquely yours.
2. Looka: Your AI-Powered Logo Co-Pilot
The logo is often the first and most intimidating piece of the branding puzzle. Where do you even start? Looka uses artificial intelligence to do the heavy lifting for you. You begin by inputting your company name, industry, and selecting styles, colors, and symbols you like. The AI then generates hundreds of unique logo options in seconds.
What makes Looka so powerful for founders is that it doesn't just stop at the logo. Once you find a design you love and purchase it, you can get a comprehensive brand kit. This isn’t just a JPG file; it’s a full suite of assets including different logo variations (for light and dark backgrounds), social media profile pictures, cover photos, email signatures, and even a one-page brand guidelines document. It's like having a junior designer on call, 24/7.
Pro Tip: Use the initial logo generation as a brainstorming session. You might not find the perfect logo immediately, but it will show you combinations of fonts, icons, and layouts you hadn't considered. Play with the editor to tweak your favorite options until it feels just right.
3. Coolors: The Ultimate Color Palette Generator
Choosing brand colors can feel arbitrary, but it’s a crucial step that sets the entire mood for your brand. Coolors makes this process fun, fast, and inspiring. The core feature is brilliantly simple: you press the spacebar, and it generates a beautiful, cohesive five-color palette. Keep hitting the spacebar until you land on one that resonates with your brand's personality.
Coolors is packed with other useful features, too. You can lock in a color you love and have the tool generate other colors that complement it. You can upload a photo that captures your brand's vibe and have it extract a palette directly from the image. It even includes tools to check for different types of color blindness, ensuring your brand is accessible to everyone.
Pro Tip: Once you find a palette you love, save it! Copy the hex codes (the six-digit codes like #3A86FF) and store them in a safe place. A great starting palette includes a dark color for text, a light color for backgrounds, a primary brand color for headlines and calls-to-action, and one or two secondary accent colors.
4. Google Fonts: The Free Typography Goldmine
The fonts you choose say a lot about your brand. Are you modern and clean, or traditional and elegant? Google Fonts is an incredible resource with over 1,400 font families that are all open-source and completely free for commercial use. No licensing headaches, no hidden fees.
The key to great typography is pairing. You generally need two fonts: one for headlines (a "display" font) and one for body text (a "paragraph" font). Google Fonts makes this easy by suggesting popular pairings for any font you select. This helps you avoid clashing styles and ensures your text is not only on-brand but also highly readable, which is critical for user experience on your website and marketing materials.
Pro Tip: A timeless and effective strategy is to pair a serif font (with the little "feet" on the letters, like Merriweather) with a sans-serif font (without the feet, like Montserrat). Use the more character-filled serif for headlines and the clean, readable sans-serif for longer paragraphs of text.
5. Pexels & Unsplash: For Jaw-Dropping, Free Stock Photos
Your brand's visual identity extends to the photography you use. Cheesy, generic stock photos can instantly cheapen your brand. This is where Pexels and Unsplash come in. These platforms offer massive libraries of beautiful, high-resolution, and artistic photos submitted by talented photographers from around the world—all for free.
Forget the awkward, staged office photos. Here you’ll find authentic-looking images that can elevate your website, blog posts, and social media content. You can search by keyword, color, or orientation to find the perfect image that aligns with your brand's aesthetic and message.
Pro Tip: Don’t just download photos as you need them. Create a collection or board (both sites have this feature) of images that fit your brand’s mood and color scheme. This creates a curated library of on-brand visuals you can pull from at a moment's notice, ensuring a consistent look and feel across all your channels.
6. Remove.bg: The One-Click Background Remover
This tool does exactly what its name says, and it does it brilliantly. Remove.bg allows you to upload any image and, with a single click, it uses AI to magically remove the background. The precision is astounding, even with tricky subjects like hair or fur.
For founders, this tool is a secret weapon. Need to create a clean product shot for your e-commerce store? Snap a photo with your phone and let Remove.bg place it on a pure white or on-brand colored background. Want to use a headshot in a social media graphic without a distracting background? This is your tool. It saves you from having to learn complex masking techniques in software like Photoshop.
Pro Tip: Combine this tool with Canva. Remove the background from a product image using Remove.bg, then upload the resulting transparent PNG file to Canva to create stunning ads, banners, and social media posts.
7. The Noun Project: Icons for Absolutely Everything
Icons are the unsung heroes of a brand kit. They are a visual shorthand used on your website, in your app, and on your presentations to communicate ideas quickly. Consistency in your icon style is a subtle detail that makes a brand feel polished and thoughtfully designed. The Noun Project is the world's most diverse collection of icons for literally anything you can imagine.
With millions of icons created by a global community of designers, you can find a symbol for any concept. The free plan allows you to use icons with attribution, while a very affordable pro subscription gives you royalty-free access and the ability to customize the icon's color right on the site before you download.
Pro Tip: Choose an icon style and stick to it. Whether you prefer thin line-art, solid filled shapes, or a more illustrative style, consistency is key. Using icons from the same designer or collection on The Noun Project is an easy way to achieve this.
8. Smartmockups: Bring Your Brand to Life
How do you show off your new app, ebook, or website in a way that looks tangible and professional? The answer is mockups. Smartmockups is a browser-based tool that lets you place your designs onto a huge variety of real-world objects—from iPhone screens and laptops to t-shirts and coffee mugs—in just a few clicks.
This is invaluable for creating marketing materials. Instead of just showing a flat screenshot of your website, you can show it on a laptop screen in a cozy cafe setting. It helps your customers visualize your product in their own lives, making it feel more real and desirable. It’s an instant way to add a layer of professionalism that used to require expensive photoshoots or advanced Photoshop skills.
Pro Tip: Use mockups on your website's landing page and in your social media ads. A mockup of your digital product (like a course or an ebook) can make it feel more tangible and valuable, increasing conversion rates.
9. Figma: The 'Grow-With-You' Design Hub
Now, don't be intimidated. Figma is a professional-grade design tool used by teams at companies like Microsoft and Airbnb. So why is it on a list for non-designers? Because its free tier is incredibly generous and it's the perfect place to build and store your central brand guidelines document.
Instead of having your brand assets scattered across different folders, you can create a single Figma file to be your "source of truth." Create frames for your logo variations, add your color palette with hex codes clearly labeled, and type out examples of your headline and body fonts. It’s a living document that you can easily share with a freelancer or new team member down the line. As my friend and mentor Goh Ling Yong often says, mastering one core use of a powerful tool is far more effective than being overwhelmed by all its features.
Pro Tip: Start simple. Use Figma to create a single A4-sized page that outlines your brand. Add your logo, color swatches (just use the rectangle tool), and text boxes defining your typography. Export it as a PDF that you can reference anytime.
10. Adobe Express: The Polished Canva Alternative
It’s always good to have options, and Adobe Express (formerly Adobe Spark) is a fantastic and powerful alternative to Canva. Backed by the creative software giant, it offers a similarly intuitive interface for creating social graphics, web pages, and short videos.
Where Express often shines is in its unique templates, which can feel a bit more premium and less ubiquitous than some of Canva's more popular designs. It also has excellent integration with Adobe's massive library of fonts (Adobe Fonts) and stock photos (Adobe Stock), giving you access to a different pool of high-quality assets. Its animation and video features are particularly robust, making it a great choice if you plan to create a lot of dynamic content for platforms like Instagram Reels or TikTok.
Pro Tip: If you're focusing on video content, give Adobe Express a serious look. The ability to quickly animate text and icons can make your social media feed stand out without a steep learning curve.
Your Brand is Waiting
Building a brand from scratch doesn't have to be a drain on your time or your wallet. The journey from a great idea to a recognizable brand is paved with smart choices and the right tools. By leveraging the power of these 10 resources, you can create a professional, consistent, and memorable brand identity that builds trust and helps your business grow.
Remember, the most important principle is consistency. Pick your colors, fonts, and logo, and use them everywhere. This is how you build recognition and become unforgettable.
Now, it's your turn. Which of these tools are you most excited to try? Do you have a favorite budget-friendly design tool that didn't make the list? Share your thoughts and finds in the comments below!
And if you found this guide helpful, make sure to subscribe to Goh Ling Yong's blog for more actionable strategies and insights tailored for ambitious founders like you.
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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