01. Gravit Designer
 |
| Gravit Designer delivers a full vector toolkit for free |
Gravit Designer is a full-featured vector design app from the company behind Corel Draw. It's suitable for all sorts of design jobs, from screen, app and icon designs to presentations, illustration and animation.
With a clean and intuitive interface that adjusts itself as you need it, this free graphic design software packs a wealth of tools for creating detailed and beautiful vector imagery, including non-destructive booleans, a knife tool and path graphs, plus multiple fills and blending modes, and a powerful text engine.
You can use Gravit Designer online or download a copy to your computer; note that you automatically start out on a (free) trial of Gravit Designer Pro when you sign up, and once your trial is over you transition to the free version, but lose the Pro features – unless you pay for a subscription of course.
However, Gravit Designer's free version is still excellent. You can export as PDF, SVG or bitmap, and you get access to the Gravit Cloud service that enables you to get to your work wherever you are.
02. Vectr
 |
| Vectr's online options make it great for live collaboration |
Platform: Browser, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS
Available both as a browser-based web app and as a stand-alone desktop app, Vectr is a free editor for creating 2D vector graphics. With all the vector features you'd expect, plus a wealth of options for using filters, shadows and fonts, it's versatile enough for day-to-day design tasks. Its live collaboration and synchronisation options are particularly handy, as they essentially enable anyone to watch you design, live, meaning it's really easy to create in tandem or send feedback. This is a genuine alternative to Adobe Illustrator CC.
03. SVG-Edit
Platform: Browser
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. SVG (scalable vector graphics) 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.
The standard – albeit basic – toolset of every vector-image editor is here, and although it's limited to the SVG format, it's surprisingly capable. Note that if you're not familiar with code, this option probably isn't for you.
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. SVG (scalable vector graphics) 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.
The standard – albeit basic – toolset of every vector-image editor is here, and although it's limited to the SVG format, it's surprisingly capable. Note that if you're not familiar with code, this option probably isn't for you.
04. Inkscape
 |
| Free graphic design software Inkscape has very good SVG integration |
As with many of the free options available, Inkscape focuses on the SVG format as its primary file format. This highly capable editor has a very good SVG integration, supporting many of the more advanced features that aren't always available in other apps – such as alpha blending, cloned objects and markers.
Full support for different colour modes means this is a viable alternative to Illustrator for both print and web design, and although the interface is somewhat simpler than Illustrator, it's still possible to achieve extremely sophisticated artwork. Of particular note is the ability to trace bitmap images, support for variable width strokes and native import of Illustrator files.
05. Canva
 |
| Edit images, create colour palettes, match font pairs and more with Canva |
It seems harsh to place Canva under the 'Image Editing Software' heading because it does so much more. Canva is a photo editor, colour palette tool, font combination picker, learning resource, and photo collage maker, and it even features a dedicated infographic maker with hundreds of free design elements and fonts at your fingertips.
It's really more of a full graphic design suite than a photo editor, and while it comes some way short of offering the breadth of abilities of Adobe Creative Cloud, its simplicity, variety of useful tools, and inspirational learning assets make Canva a hit. You can use Canva in the browser for the full experience, but most tools are available for both Android and iOS.
No comments:
Post a Comment