With all the research and group work going on in my last year, this round-up is distinctly presentation-centric. This might be a long overdue post considering I’m 3 weeks away from finishing my undergrad but I’m sure you will be able to make use of these tools at some point in your life!
SlidesCarnival – Are you bored of all the standard PowerPoint templates? Don’t want to put in that much effort to create your own on Google Slides? I strongly recommend looking for your next template here because they’re so pretty and simple to export to Google Sheets for editing. I really appreciate that there are icons included in the templates. My favourite ones are Olivia, Aemelia, and Arvirargus.
Beautiful.ai – Gorgeous slides not enough for you? Also, want something that can animate your objects and fix all your font and formatting? I gotchu. Or rather, the team at Beautiful.ai does. They have editable objects in their templates that keep your presentation simple but polished. It’ll look like you laboured over it for hours when all you did was read this blog post and decide to try this tool out. Take a look at this sample presentation to see what your future projects can look like!
The Noun Project, Iconfinder, Flaticon – Okay, so you have your pretty presentation slides or maybe you’re trying to create an infographic in Canva (which is my one true love, please no one judge me). You need simple but aesthetic icons but have no idea where to go. These three sites are my go-to’s for finding cute icons to spruce up, say, a blog post about sustainability. They all have free icon options that have a variety of different licenses so make sure you follow the attribution rules accordingly.
Pexels, Unsplash – And of course you’ll probably want some high-quality not-boring stock images for your slides or your designs. I’m sure you have heard of these two sites but it’s because they’re the best source for those aesthetic stock photos that won’t make your project feel stuffy.
Lettucemeet – A really cute and simple alternative to Doodle and its competitors. It’s got a clean look, very easy to set up, and its name is a fun pun – what more could you want? Trying to coordinate group meetings is a headache but at least you’ll enjoy the scheduling tool.
Typito – Basically the Canva for videos! I was trying to do some basic text overlay on a short video last week and every video program I downloaded was either too bloated with features I did not need, didn’t even offer me the functionality I was looking for or had very obnoxious watermarks on the final product. This tool makes it really easy with the web fonts you’re used to in other tools and drag and drop capabilities! It works best for very simple projects (you can’t change font sizes beyond the presets they have for you) so I wouldn’t recommend it for anything too hefty.
Go forth and make great slides/videos/infographics! Are there other tools that I should be adding to this list?
Vicky Jiang 