A Quick Guide to Stencil for Beginners

Do you want beautiful social media graphics for your business? You don’t need to hire a designer or have any design skills. Stencil is an online graphic design tool that allows you to create beautiful images with just a few clicks of the mouse. In this blog post, we will talk about how easy it is to use stencil and what make Stencil such a wonderful product!

Stencil is a web-based graphic design program that’s designed for people with little or no graphic design expertise who need to generate digital designs quickly.

Stencil’s basic purpose is a resizable image with clickable layers where you may modify the background, layout, text, color, typography, and visual characteristics of an image while shrinking it down for sharing.

Stencil provides a library of free typefaces, graphics, stock photos, and icons for commercial use. They’re also equipped with built-in storage for settings, custom templates, and uploaded photos.

How it Works

The user interface for Stencil is very simple and straightforward. You can get started with their trial plan for free, which offers basic features.

You may either use their web editor or their browser add-ons, WordPress plugin, or both to log in.

Stencil is easy for beginners to use. You start by dragging an image or icon into the workspace, followed by customizing its layout and appearance with a variety of tools in Stencil’s interface.

You can easily customize colors, fonts, backgrounds, borders, shadows etc. Then you click on “SAVE” when done. That option saves your design into an uploader where you will be able to promote it online.

PROs

• The major pro of Stencil is that they offer a free plan

You may try it out yourself by signing up. Everyone’s workflows are slightly different, so it’s nice to have a tool that gives you use without any commitment. They also give you a 7-day free trial of premium features.

• Ease of Use and Onboarding

Stencil is easy to use, even for beginners. You don’t need any design expertise or knowledge of coding languages in order to get started with Stencil. They also have tutorials on their website that users can refer back to if they’re having trouble understanding the interface of Stencil.

• Price Value

Stencil is fairly priced for what it offers. They offer a free plan with limited features, and additionally have premium plans that give access to additional tools like logo design, custom template downloads, etc.

• Versatile

Stencil is very versatile. You can use it for quick social media graphics, or to create beautiful images with clickable links that you may publish on your website.

• Graphics Asset

Stencil has beautiful graphics available for free. All of the images are beautiful high-resolution or vector art that is perfect to use online, but you can still download them as PNG files if needed. It has huge libraries of beautiful images that are completely free to use in your projects.

• Product Focus

Stencil is mostly known for its beautiful social media graphics. Stencil focuses on providing beautiful images that are suitable for publishing online, especially through your social media channels like Instagram or Facebook.

CONs

Stencil has a lot of advantages, but I’ve also discovered some drawbacks. These drawbacks aren’t always considered negative aspects of the product. Instead, they’re more drawbacks than benefits when the tool and the user don’t match.

Stencil isn’t meant to be used by everyone. Some people will be dissatisfied with some of the restrictions.

• Pricing & Caps

Stencil’s trial plan is free, but you only have access to limited features. Stencil limits the amount of images that can be saved on their free plan which means new users may not find it very useful for promoting online or building beautiful graphics.

• Team Sharing

Stencil does not have a team sharing option. Stencil works best if you work with just one other person or perhaps small teams of two to three people at the most.

• Design and Branding Tools

Stencil doesn’t offer any design tools like logos or beautiful templates. It’s more of a graphics tool than anything, and it’s limited in that way because you can only use Stencil to create beautiful images with clickable links, but not for building websites or designing banner ads etc.

Pricing

Stencil may be a wonderful deal, and their free and paid tiers still have fairly strict limitations.

Conclusion

Stencil isn’t for everyone, but for a single entrepreneur, it’s been a no-brainer not just in terms of time saved, but also in terms of presenting a consistent, professional appearance.

If you meet any or all of the above conditions, you should certainly join up for Stencil.

John Lawson is one of the most trusted and experienced eCommerce professionals in the industry. John is the founder of The Ecommerce Group, which he started in 2011 to share his knowledge with other entrepreneurs in the industry. It’s the oldest eCommerce group on Facebook with over 8,500 members from around the world!

John speaks at conferences all around the world, including Retail Global, South by Southwest, Etail, Digital Summit, Hubspot Inbound, Ad-Tech and more. He also writes for several international publications such as Power Retail, Small Business Trends and Disrupt Magazine.