You have a small business. And because of a tight budget, you do not wish to engage a graphic designer for your marketing and advertising needs. Yet you want to produce decent graphic promotional materials for your business.

Fret not. This article will show you how to do that. It will introduce you to the various low cost resources that are available, enabling you to produce your own promotional materials.

Firstly, we need to know the various marketing and promotional routes that are available. The list below shows some of the more common promotional channels:

1. Pamphlets and brochures

2. Posters

3. Newsletters

4. Website

Routes 1, 2 and 3 require some sort of printing services. A common platform that is used to relay design layout and artwork for professional printing service is the PDF file format. In another word, most printing service can directly accept PDF as the artwork source. Thus, you will need to find a way to output your finished artwork as PDF. Fortunately there are free options out there. Below are two of them:

1. Scribus opensource software for desktop publishing. This can be used to produce base file or artwork for print. It outputs to PDF.

2. Open Office suite can also produce PDF outputs. For pamphlet and flyer layout designs, open office may be good enough. Additionally, you may wish to do some of the fancier graphics in another program and import them into Open Office Writer as bitmap image files.

For more specialised graphic design works, there are many free options as well. The more popular ones are:

1. GIMP for general and web graphic design. This software is the free equivalent to Photoshop, which is one of the most widely accepted graphic and photo editing software in the world.

2. Blender3D for 3D graphics. This program is ideal for making rendering such as 3D logos and product packaging.

Both software can output JPEG or TGA files which can be imported into your preferred desktop publishing program such as Open Office Writer.

Well, we have listed the various software options. Now, where can we get them? These tools can be downloaded off the internet. To do so, simply search for them using the major search engines which will lead you to their homepage. Download links should be available on their homepage.

Additionally, having a source to photographs is important. Depending on the nature of your business, having a reasonably good digital camera may be essential. You may need it for shooting product and presentation shots.

Please understand that this is just an article on the various low cost options out there. Learning how to use the tools requires time and effort and is thus not within the scope of this article.

Thank you for reading. I hope that it has been useful.