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Perth Brand and Marketing Strategist - Nicole Hailwood

​From higher education to local council, community groups and small business, Nicole has worked across a wide range of organisations throughout her 10+ years in the marketing game. She also carries a Bachelor of Communication & Master of Business Studies with Distinction in Communication.

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Strategically minded and creatively wired, Nicole has the ability to carry out both big picture high-level planning, as well as finer detail execution with flair.

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She's big on quality over quantity, always encouraging her clients to focus on value-packed content and doing things in alignment. Above all else, she lives for creating meaningful CONNECTION and showing her clients how they can grow their business through relationships, referrals and strong branding that creates a loyal and emotional bond.

NICOLE HAILWOOD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Writer's pictureNicole Hailwood
Jul 73 min read

Creative Software I'm Loving

If you want to create beautifully branded, high-quality content, I'm a big believer in starting with the right tools for the job! And by tools I mean purpose-built design platforms and software.


Content creation can be freaking time-consuming. One of the best ways to combat this is to use platforms that are fully equipped with all of the things you need to design with flow and ease, ensuring your outputs are top-notch quality and made to look exactly how you want.


So to help you up your content game and produce graphics, emails and videos that your audience will love to consume, I'm opening up my own toolkit to share with you the top four pieces of creative software that, as a marketer, I'm loving and using at the moment.


creative-software-by-brand-designer-Perth-Nicole

The four pieces of creative software that I'm loving right now are Canva, Adobe Illustrator, Flo Desk and Veed.


1. CANVA

Well this one is a no-brainer really. If you're a business owner and you haven't heard of Canva yet, man oh man I'm about to rock your world. Seriously. Go and check it out.


For everyone else, chances are I'm probably preaching to the converted on this one. Canva makes designing graphics and content for just about ANY medium (social media, flyers, business cards, presentations) a total breeze - once you learn how to use it, of course.


I love Canva because it comes with an almost endless library of graphics, photos, fonts and templates that you can use to make something super unique in minimal time. And unlike stock websites, you're not paying for every individual photo or icon you chose to use - it's all included. The interface is a really simple drag and drop style and things like layering items, re-sizing and re-formatting is easy. OMG who remembers the days of clip art and using Word and when you move one photo, everything else on the page moves to?!


When using Canva, I highly recommend having a paid subscription. This will give you access to a heap of features that are seriously worth it. Some of my favourites are the background remover, quick re-size, and brand kit.


2. ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR

Disclaimer on this one - Adobe software can be fairly high spec, and it's probably not what I would recommend to anyone who doesn't have design experience. Buuuuut, I couldn't write about creative software and not include Adobe Illustrator.


Adobe Illustrator is like the older, more sophisticated, OG, design platform. The one that ruled the roost before Canva was even born. And although it doesn't have all of the fancy templates or stock like Canva does, it's design capability is second-to-none.


You can pretty much manipulate anything to look how you want in Illustrator. Want to make the one letter on a word bigger and curvier than the rest, you can do that. Want to blend two letters together and have one as a cut-out of the other? You can do that.


I use Illustrator whenever I am creating a client's new logo or brand. With Illustrator I can export a wide variety of editable and non-editable file types (for enhance longevity and use), plus it gives me free rein to create something super unique for the client.


3. FLO DESK

Flo Desk is an email campaign software purposefully built for creating and sending beautifully designed emails. As a total design freak I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it. Yea it's a little pricey compared to a lot of other platforms out there, but if you want to send emails that make a statement (but are still easy to pull together) Flo Desk is the place to do it.


You can save your brand colours to the design kit, embed your Instagram feed, and lay out images and text in really creative ways.


4. VEED

A few weeks ago I was on the hunt for a video editing software that allowed me to create quality portrait videos for Instagram. I wanted something that was:

  • Easy to use (I literally wasted 4 hours of my life testing out Adobe Premiere and wanting to die trying to colour grade)

  • Had a timeline view (Canva grates me because it's timeline view currently only works for standard 16:9 landscape videos)

  • Equipped with its own auto-generated captions/sub-titles feature

  • Allowed me to add my own fonts and colours to text overlays and captions

After trying lots of different paid and free apps and software I finally landed on Veed. And thank freaking god. It literally ticks all of the boxes, and to me - that's worth paying for. With video being such a prominent content type these days being able to produce high-quality branded videos with ease is a MUST.


So there you go, my top four pieces of creative software I'm loving right now - Canva, Adobe Illustrator, Flo Desk and Veed. Go and check them out!

With good vibes,

Nicole
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