3 TOP FREE DESIGN SOFTWARE
Today I’ve got a real treat people because I’m gonna show you a list of the best free design software choices for 2020.
I’m also gonna show you what makes them so awesome apart from the fact that they are completely free!
Blender
The first of the three truly awesome and free design software examples is a blender glenda is used for working with 3d designs and actually has found its way into the hearts of many indie game developers and hobbyists so one of the best elements of blender is the modeling tools blender is known to have a very intuitive and an easy-to-understand a modeling workflow now if you’re getting into 3d applications strictly for asset creation then blend that can be a great option but of course has got many capabilities that you would expect any 3d application to have such as rigging texturing animation and so forth it also has a built in a game engine and do remember this is totally for free blender also has a huge community of enthusiasts and the game developers so there is always a lot of support there if you do need it but no seriously blender is completely free there are no hang-ups at all there are no scams or hidden agendas and in that sense it is pretty unique because in spite of being free to the end user it is a viable alternative to any paid software that you can find for 3d work the creators do earn money from donations and other means but for you as a user it is totally free if you want it to be a blender does have one thing over most 3d applications and that is it covers the full workflow from concept to final output and it does each step extremely extremely well .
I am self teaching blend at the moment and I think it’s a great stepping stone to other paid programs if you want to take the knee sector of 3d design or animation really really seriously but you can do wonderful things with this free software and there are just a few downsides and one of them is the learning curve because it is quite a difficult software to grasp early on but that’s like with pretty much anything new in life also the menus are a tad cluttered to many users but these two points are pretty insignificant especially considering it’s a free program to use.
Inkscape
So next on this list is a free rival to Adobe Illustrator and as you know a illustrator is really close to my heart , but Inkscape is a great free program for creating vectors and as you may know a vector is a scalable graphic that doesn’t lose linequality now Inkscape is so good in fact that it’s a serious alternative to premium tools like Adobe Illustrator and I personally prefer to use illustrator of course but you could certainly use Inkscape for most of your vector design work pretty easily with Inkscape you can work with SVG files but also imports in the EPS PostScript JPEG as well as exporting PNG and other vector based formats you can find many of the tools that you’d expect to find in Illustrator such as shape tools text layers nodes complex paths gradients and so on the open source code of the software lets you manually change the lines of code to improve the program and to customize it in the ways that you want to use it Inkscape will be the best choice for beginners or hobbyists but it’s not going to be suitable for experienced users most of the time if someone is earning a nice you know monthly income they probably would best off just be spending that on an illustrator subscription some tools still require improvement in Inkscape and the user interface isn’t that too friendly in some respects but you can customize things to a large degree which does help with that issue also there are various extensions available which means you can take the software to new highs one issue though is that the processing can be slow and this is something that you do want to consider if you’re working on large projects on a frequent basis
Inkscape doesn’t offer any pricing plans for businesses as it is an open-source program and you can download it for free on Windows Mac or Linux .
Gimp
And the third free software for 2020 is really awesome and that is a gimp which is short for a GNU image manipulation program it’s an excellent free alternative to photoshop that more than just simply provides a good alternative and don’t you think the lack of having a price tag means GIMP is lacking your features it has a lot of things going for it and it does put a good fight up against Photoshop especially considering it’s free side by side of course Photoshop is the better one but not by a huge margin GIMP comes with impressive selections of features various ways to retouch images cropping noise reduction and color adjustment tools you also have customizable brushes and gradients and so much much more there’s also plenty for the more advanced users including layer masks busier curves filters and even animation packages the interface is highly customizable and the game community has produced a ton of excellent plugins that are all free to download too and the program is loaded with tutorials and plenty of assistance to be found in the active helpful community so like with the others on today’s list it’s also an open source program and there is an offshoot called GIMP shop which features a user interface that mimics the appearance and terminology of Photoshop which is something to look into GIMP can do more than most hobbyist would ever need the Photoshop can still go the extra mile and do more there is a perception that open source is always distributed with spyware or susceptible to crashes and data losses and this can turn some users off whether that perception is valid or nots will contribute to you are deciding if this tool is for you or not but again it is free for you to download and you do pay nothing to get a whole lot it.
If you want to read more on getting free stuff as a graphic designer subscribes to my newsletter for weekly graphic design content take care and until next time.
So are you going to install these awesome free software or not? , do let me know in the comments down below.
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