Ever fancied having a graphic design team at your fingertips to help your business with branding, marketing and reach, but can’t afford to hire more people? How about a customizable AI service instead? This is what the amazingly named “design.com" aims to offer (incredible that URL was still available).

Design.com: Pricing & plans

• Barely any free templates, but at least you can try all the tools before choosing a subscription plan

Although you can explore all of what Design.com has to offer, and experiment with all of its tools to your heart’s content, you’ll find this service is primarily a paid one. Sure, you’ll spot the odd free design here and there, discernible by a ‘free’ moniker top left of a template’s thumbnail, but sadly, those are few and far between.

When it comes to choosing a paid tier to suit your needs, I found the choices to be somewhat confusing, as the plans on offer differ depending on the services you’re using.

For instance, working in the logo section will bring up ‘Premium Logo Pack’ or ‘Premium Logo Pack + Website’, ranging from €3 to €6 per month, billed annually (paying on a month by month basis is considerably more expensive: from €9 to €14).

However, if you come from the YouTube Banner, Instagram Post or T-Shirt sections, say, you only have one option: ‘Premium Account’, for €5 a month billed annually, or €9 on a month by month basis, yet both ‘Premium Account’ and ‘Premium Logo Pack’ allow you to edit posts, logos and more… Why the discrepancy, in tier name and cost, depending on which service you start from?

I must note that over the days I spent experimenting with this service, these options changed: there used to be three different tiers coming from the logo service, and two from the others, so it might be possible that they will have changed again once you try the service out for yourself.

Design.com: Categories & templates

• A wealth of different categories, with hundreds of templates for each. It’s very easy to navigate through them all.

Design.com certainly is feature packed. It’s a logo maker, sure, but it also offers you the ability to create business cards, posters, flyers, banners for YouTube and LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram posts and stories, email signatures, entire websites, T-shirts, and more.

The platform's focus is on allowing AI to do the bulk of the work for you, with customizations available further down the line if they’re needed. The aim here is to offer you a design so good, you don’t need to do anything to it, except insert your business's info.

The way it works is incredibly simple: at the top of the page is a menu-bar, broken down by category, with options within each category being quite vast. If this feels too clinical for you, scroll down the main page instead to browse through a list of the most common services, with big friendly images and description of what to expect.

Remember: the vast majority of the templates will have to be paid for. Only a handful are available for free, and as you’d expect, they won’t be the flashiest, nicest looking ones. Still, free is free. You’re also able to explore and customize all templates, even the premium ones, as you only get to the paywall when you’ve finalized your design, giving you a good opportunity to try out every feature.

If you’re on the lookout for a free logo and don’t fancy scrolling through the long list hoping to find the handful of free templates available, click here to see the free designs and not the premium ones.

Design.com: Choices

• So many choices increases the odds you’ll find the perfect AI creation for you. You’re given a few basic customization options, with the more in-depth alterations saved for another part of the service

Looking through Design.com’s vast choices can be overwhelming, although the developers have gone to great lengths to keep the results focused on what you’re looking for.

To make this work, once you’ve selected the type of service you’re after (be it a poster, website, post, business card, logo, etc), you’ll need to enter a list of keywords so the website’s AI can get to work. There are exceptions to this, like the Business Card or Logo sections, for instance, which request your business name instead.

If you have a logo already designed, you can upload it at the same time, and it’ll be integrated into the results.

Once you click on the big blue ‘Start Now’ button, you’ll be instantly given dozens of variations based on your business name and/or keywords. Actually scratch that: that’s just the first page: scroll down to the bottom and you’ll find hundreds of additional pages waiting for you, which means you have thousands of templates to choose from, which you can narrow down with a selection of filters, additional keywords and searches.

Click on the one you like best to select it and be taken to the next steps, which include changing the template’s default colours, altering the text (or let AI write something for you), and finally select a layout from a choice of six, if the original one wasn’t to your liking.

If this is as much editing as you have the time or inclination for, click on Download to claim your prize… or so I might’ve hoped. I’ve already covered that most templates aren’t free, but if you’re working on one that is, you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it. I lost count of how many pages offering me special (paid) deals I had to skip through in order to finally be able to download my file.

Design.com: Customization & export

• The level of customization is high, giving you full control over your creation - although that’s solely reserved for paying customers. As for exporting your work, the number of options on offer is broad.

Keeping it simple is great and a very useful timesaver, but if you have specific ideas not reflected by the AI results, you’ll be pleased to learn these designs are fully customisable, although be aware this feature is for paying customers only.

You have access to the full layout, being able to move and resize and even rotate any object present on the template. You can even bring in new shapes and clip art should you want to.

Altering an item’s colour is just a click away, you have full control over text boxes, from style, to format, to font. It’s all fun and easy to use. If you’re familiar with Canva, you’ll feel right at home here.

Whether you customized your layout or not, now’s the time to download it. The choices you have are refreshingly vast, and this also applies to the free templates you might elect to use.

Being able to download the full design is a given, but you also have the option of exporting a version with a transparent background, or to just get the icon, solely grab the text, or turn the whole creation into greyscale. You even have a choice of format, from JPG, PNG, SVG, EPS or PDF.

This level of choice is most welcome as it can allow people to edit the design further elsewhere, should they want to.

Should I buy Design.com?

Buy it if...

You’re looking for a service that uses AI to generate designs for your business at a fraction of what it would cost to maintain a creative team. There’s a handful of free templates, as well as reasonable subscription rates to gain access to all templates and full customization control.

Don't buy it if...

You want total creative control over your designs without AI input. And the free options feel pretty meagre compared to the more lavish premium templates.

For more options, we've tested and reviewed the best logo makers and the best free logo makers.