The Web has definitely gone visual. Pinterest is the latest craze and trend. Various surveys and reports show that the site is a great source of traffic and incoming links to content creators. And the popularity of visual content is still growing. Savvy bloggers turn this visual trend to their advantage.
Here is the list of twenty free and nifty web tools that can help us to create more appealing imagery for spicing up our blogs and sites.
1) Flaming Text is a free and easy to use online logo design tool. You don’t need any design experience to create a professionally looking logo for your blog. Simply select one of the high quality logo designs, customize it and then use on the blog.
2)Cool Text is one of the best-known free online graphics generators. You can use it to generate logos, buttons and fonts for your blog.
3)PicMarkr enables you to protect your pictures with text or image watermarks. It is a free online tool. You can upload and stamp images from your computer or grab them from Picasa, Flickr, or Facebook. PicMarkr supports bulk upload watermarking and lets you resize uploaded pictures. You can choose the width of your pictures based on whether you want to optimize them for blogs, forums or emailing.
4)Image to Favicon.ico will help you to convert an image, logo or photo into *.ICO icon format. It is a free online tool which supports jpg, gif, png, tiff and bmp file formats for uploading. Favicon or “Favorites icon” is the little icon that appears in your browser next to URL address of a site or blog. This icon is usually in .ICO format.
5)Avatar.Pho.to is a free online avatar generator that allows you to create an animated or static avatar from your photo. There are over 70 unique avatar templates at Avatar.Pho.to that you can choose from. You can also add different cool photo effects to your photos. It takes like a minute to create an awesome avatar that you can use on blogs, forums, Facebook and other social sites.
6)DoppelMe is another free online avatar maker. Create a cool graphical likeness of yourself, your friends and family, or anyone else with just a few mouse clicks.
7)Spamstone is a free GIF file generator that allows you to convert your email address into image which you can use on your blog. This website basically makes your blog email addresses invisible for spammers’ robots and thus protects you from spam. Your blog visitors will nevertheless able to read it and email you.
8)EnhancePho.to is a one-click online photo enhancer. The tool allows you to instantly fix your digital photos. You can quickly remove red eyes, fix colors and sharpen photos, or remove digital noise. It is great for bloggers who don’t have much time for enhancing the photos they would like to use on their blogs and elsewhere.
9)Resizr is a free web-based app for resizing and cropping images. It is extremely handy tool for every blogger since it allows us to easily and quickly improve pictures for our blogs and sharing on the social web. Beside cropping and resizing images, you can also rotate them, specify the desired size, adjust contrast, brightness and saturation, or white balance your images.
10)TagCrowd is a web application that allows you to create a tag cloud from any text to visualize word frequency. You can use it to showcase the most popular and relevant tags on your blog.
11)ImageChef is a great online tool for creating word mosaics, cover images for Facebook timeline, sketchpads or simply dropping your photos into one of 100 available fun picture frames.
12)Share as Image lets you highlight text anywhere on the web and turn it into an image. This tool is great for creating quote images that you can share on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.
13)Map2Pic lets you take screenshots from Google maps and save them png or jpg image file formats. This is especially useful tool for travel bloggers.
14)Photo Pin is a tool that will help you find free photos with Creative Commons license that you can use on your blogs. You can download the photos and get already formatted attribution links.
15)PicFont is a simple app that allows you to quickly add text to picture, canvas or shape.
16)FotoSketcher automatically turns your photos into drawings, cartoons and paintings. It basically allows you to create artwork from your digital photos in just a few seconds. The power of the software lies in the fact that you don’t need any artistic skills. Simply choose among over 20 available effects and impress your blog readers with your artistic skills.
17)Cartoonize is a web app that transforms your photos to cartoons with just a click of a mouse. You can upload photos from disk or URL and convert them instantly without registration. Cartoonize supports the following image formats: gif, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp, and xbm.
18)myFBCovers provides ready-made profile covers for your Facebook timeline as well as a user friendly timeline cover creator. This one and similar websites are a shortcut to a professionally looking timeline cover.
19)Photo Collage allows you to create online photo collages, photo animations and photo slideshows.
20)LunaPic is a pretty powerful online photo editor to edit your pictures for Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. It allows you to open images directly from your Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Photobucket accounts. You can also upload images from your computer or from Web with the image URL. LunaPic editor lets you draw on the image, add text and border to image, rotate, resize and crop image, blend two images, create video gifs, collages, and more.
There are many more really useful free tools for creating and enhancing pictures. Do you have your favorites? Share in comments with the rest of us!
By Guest Author – Goranka Radojcic is an online marketing specialist and a small business consultant as well as Internet enthusiast. She is also an executive editor of a Serbian marketing blog.
