5 free software for your design needs

Getting a hold of some decent software or applications is always a tricky one. Sometimes you have to pay through the nose to get a best bit of kit out there. But, if you trawl along around on the internet you can find something just as good. So, I saved you the time and picked out some of the best software to use that you may just need.

GIMP

If your a fan of Photoshop this open-source free graphic design software stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program.

Today it’s available in versions for Linux, Windows, and Mac. GIMP's interface differs somewhat from Photoshop, but a version of GIMP is available that mimics Adobe's look and feel, making it easier to migrate over if you’re use to using Photoshop.

The full suite of tools is available here - everything you’re accustomed to is within easy reach, including painting tools, colour correction, cloning, selection, and enhancement. The team that oversees development has worked hard to ensure compatibility too, so you’ll be able to work with all the popular file formats without any trouble at all. You can download it here

Google Fonts

Google set up a service that lets you use a trust bit of code that let's you embedded a number of cusomt fonts directly onto your site.

Google Fonts - recently did a deal with font service Monotype to make its free fonts available for desktop use. Monotype's SkyFonts software is normally used to rent commercial fonts for short-term use. But the new deal means you can access desktop versions of hundreds of Google Fonts - previously only available for use as web fonts - via SkyFonts, for as long as you want.

Blender

No this ain't for food, Blender is a highly impressive 3D rending tool Blender is a free, open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems.

Started by Blender Foundation founder Ton Roosendaal in 2002, Blender is now largest open source tool for 3D creation. Its makers are constantly working on its development, but you can pretty much do anything 3D related with this software, including modelling, texturing, animation, rendering and compositing. This little video should give you a taste about becoming the next Pixar animator.

SVG-Edit

If you’re looking to quickly output SVG, or edit an existing SVG file, there are a few online editors that will do the job just as well as Adobe Illustrator. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an open format that allows you to reproduce your Vector drawings programmatically, and one of the nicest projects is SVG-Edit.

This is built entirely on HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript without requiring any server-side processing. So not only can you use it to create and edit documents, but as it’s open source you can also download and modify the code - making your own version if you want.

Behance

With all this free software you need somewhere to showcase it and that's were Behance comes in.

With millions of views each month, online creative community Behance is quickly becoming the place to be for artists of all disciplines. It's a fantastic way to see what your peers are up to as well as finding new work and creative inspiration from top web designers and agencies. Find the best ways to get your work noticed on Behance

So get cracking, you never know where this software could take you.

James xo