Graphic design meets open source

Being a graphic designer can be quite expensive. We like to have powerful computers and expensive business software. I’m looking at Adobe Create Suite…. There are alternatives that aim to meet the needs of our profession and products. Graphic design is an art and software is just a tool like a brush. Open source software development has created such great free products as Mozilla Firefox, Apache, and Linux. I know they all sound a bit geeky and in that sense they sound somewhat unapproachable about it, but I hope that what you see here will help you overcome your fears, uncertainties and doubts. It’s all free to use, so there’s not much risk involved. Open source is not the solution to everything, but it is a public service that we can often take advantage of. We are an adventurous group, so let’s try something different.

Here are some free graphic design software that could bring graphic design to artists who can’t or don’t want to spend the money on the corporate versions at incredible prices.

GIMP

GIMP is the best known Photoshop alternative. Most of the features you might use in Photoshop are implemented; you can crop, adjust colors, save to different file formats, use various filters and brushes. CMYK support exists, but it is quite weak and unwieldy, which may be completely unacceptable to most of us in the printing industry. However, for web design this will not be a problem as it natively supports the RGB color space. Photoshop users can check out GIMPshop (http://www.gimpshop.com), a modding package intended to help GIMP mimic Photoshop’s user interface. GIMP is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

PDFCreator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator)

This handy program is added to your Windows printer menu. Anything you print can be converted to PDF or several other graphic formats for you to manipulate. Very useful to have in any system.

Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org)

Inkscape is a vector editor similar to Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. use the standard [[SVG]]format that makes it compatible with other graphics programs. The interface is simplified and familiar as they focus on usability. It also includes tutorials and tooltips to ease the transition. They have reduced the number of palettes and all palette options are available as keyboard shortcuts. The interactive tutorials and simple interface make it very easy to get started, especially if you are familiar with other drawing programs. It is definitely a good option to investigate. Inkscape is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Scribus (http://www.scribus.net)

I’m a heavy user of InDesign and since it’s what I use at work, that probably won’t change. It’s good to know that there is an open source alternative to InDesign, Pagemaker, QuarkXPress, or even the unfortunate Microsoft Publisher. It is designed to be print-ready and runs on Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2, and Windows. If your printer accepts PDF files or any of the other formats supported by the program, you’re good to go. It is designed to work with professional teams in a prepress environment. If you are interested in designing books, brochures, business cards, this seems like a great idea. Many designers have Photoshop and/or Illustrator and try to use them for publication design.

KompoZer (http://www.kompozer.net)

KompoZer is a WYSIWYG html and css editor, think FrontPage or Dreamweaver. It is based on the same rendering platform as Firefox. It is meant to be easy to use for newcomers and non-technical users. Advanced Dreamweaver users will miss out on some features, but everyone else can do just fine with the free alternative and save a lot of money. It even creates nice, valid html that adheres to the standard of your choice.

wordpress

WordPress gives designers an easy-to-manage system for implementing hugely complicated websites. Its community creates many plugins, templates, and widgets that give it a lot of weight. So I couldn’t leave it off this list!

fontforge

FontForge is a nifty font editor that supports the very common formats TrueType, PostScript, OpenType, and more. In addition to letting you edit your fonts, it supports automatic format conversions and transformations. The documentation seems easy to follow so you can dive into the development of your font project.

open source fonts

Fonts are also software. And not too cheap either. Fortunately, open source efforts have stepped in to provide some relief. Typeforge is a project that aims to use Fontforge to create new fonts and provide support to help multilevel designers create typefaces. You can help them simply by using their sources and giving them feedback. DejaVu and Linux Libtertine are open source fonts that can be freely distributed and used in your projects. Junicode is an open source medieval style font that looks quite versatile. Free UCS Outline Fonts collects a variety of open fonts of this type. Open Font Library collects public domain fonts.

Some final notes

I still love the commercial design software out there. Open source software is still in its infancy compared to commercial software that has been developed for decades. In many ways these shows just can’t compete with that right now, but in any case they continue to serve an important market niche in our industry as an entry point for new designers, experiments for those of us who want to escape into something a little different. and a playing field for innovation.

Nobody thought that Quark would disappear, now we have InDesign. While those are commercial products, Firefox is an open source project that is now a major player in the world of web browsers. There are also a lot of little open source programs that make my life easier, but aren’t necessarily related to design. It’s kind of an edgy, fringe thing at times and on the productivity side at other times.

One last thought dammit the open source community really needs to hire some designers or what… These things too often have technical looking skins created by ugly programmers which is just the biggest turn off in the world… someone get on it!