Categories: TECHNOLOGY

Graphic Design on a Budget – Free Software for the Digital Artist

Graphic design software can be obscenely expensive.

It’s a sad fact of life for any digital artist, whether they be in graphic design, photography, or animation. Many of the industry standard programs used by major design companies today can run into the hundreds, even thousands of dollars. For example, here are the costs of brand new complete copies of some of the “industry standard” programs out there, from their respective shops online:

Adobe Creative Suite (includes Photoshop, Illustrator, and other programs) – $1,899
Individual Adobe products – between $400 – $800
Autodesk Maya & 3DS Max – $3,495

It’s enough to give any budding graphic designer a paralyzing case of sticker shock. If an artist is working in-house at a design company, the cost is often easily absorbed by their employer. However, if the artist is a student or an independent freelancer, then software from a company like Adobe or Autodesk is often far out of reach, at least when first starting out.

However, just because those programs might be out of reach for the budget-minded digital artist, doesn’t mean that they all are. There are a number of freeware graphic design programs online that are just as good (or in some cases even better) than the industry standards. Here are five free graphic design software programs available to anyone with an internet connection.

An Alternative to Photoshop – GIMP (www.gimp.org)
If you are a photographer in search of a photo manipulation program or a graphic designer looking to create digital paintings and other original images, then GIMP is a one-stop shop for you. “GIMP” stands for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, but its functionality extends far beyond what its acronym describes.

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For photographers, GIMP offers a full collection of advanced photo enhancement and image manipulation tools to clean up and enhance their photographs. For graphic designers, the program gives them a slew of painting and color tools. Even animators have their needs met in GIMP, as the program has an animation plugin package called GAP that can be added on.

GIMP is an extremely flexible, stable program, usable on all the popular operating systems, and is well supported by both its developers and users. As this year marks its fifteenth anniversary, GIMP continues to grow and evolve into a high end program to rival Photoshop.

An Alternative to Illustrator – Inkscape (www.inkscape.org)
With the rise of mobile devices and the constant evolution of websites, the use of vector-based graphics continues to become more and more prevalent. The professional industry standard for scalable vector graphics is yet another Adobe product, this one called Illustrator. There are a variety of different freeware and open source software options for the artist looking for a more cost-effective alternative to Illustrator. One of these is a program called Inkscape.

Especially if you are an artist looking to focus on developing graphics for mobile devices, such as cell phones, smartphones, and digital tablets, Inkscape is a solid program. This is because it’s native file format is the svg (scalable vector graphic), which is supported on a wide variety of handsets due to their flexibility of dimensions as well as their usually small file sizes.

Even if you’re not working on mobile devices, Inkscape is ideal for anyone looking to create vector-based illustrations. Even though it may not share all of the bells, whistles, and filters as the latest version of Illustrator, Inkscape does cover much of the core functionality that makes for a solid vector graphics editor. It is ideal for creating illustrations, icons, and web graphics.

An Alternative to 3DS Max & Maya – Blender (www.blender.org)
Industry standard 3D modelling and animation programs can be some of the most expensive in the design industry, commanding costs upward of several thousand dollars just for a single copy. If you’re an artist looking to create 3D graphics for gaming, visualizations, or computer aided drafting, then you’re not out of luck. You have Blender.

Blender is a spectacularly detailed and feature-rich 3D software program with all the bells and whistles and none of the four-digit dollar amounts. Fair warning, this program has a steep learning curve. The interface is unlike anything in any other graphic design program on the market, both free or paid. However, there are plenty of online tutorials and learning aids, and once an artist learns how to navigate the interface, it is said to be one of the most intuitive 3D programs to use.

This program can be used to create the hyper realistic to the fantastically cartoony. One needs only to browse through Blender’s official gallery to see the marvelous capabilities of this program. Rest assured that you, the user, are not shortchanging yourself in any fashion if you decide to use this free program rather than it’s $3,500 equivalent.

In Conclusion
The professional creative design industry can an expensive career field to crack into, but with solid, high end free software like these, it doesn’t have to be. When all is said and done, ultimately the success of a photographer, animator, or graphic designer rests not in how expensive their tools are, but how they use the tools they have.