Graphic Design Forums: UK forums for graphic designers - View Single Post

jamjar · 09-03-2009, 08:54 AM

Open Source software is often really very good, and the popular packages like GIMP have huge communities who work out of love and devotion, not cash which often yields better results and faster bug fixes.

Having said this, I use the Adobe Suite as it is industry standard (especially important when working with legacy files from other designers) and the best by a long stretch. I do however use the following freeware tools which are fabulous;

InkScape - has very good tracing and vector drawing tools
Blender - amazing 3d modeling, rendering, game development, seriously amazing
Font Forge - create and adapt fonts - a pain to set up on Widows but worth the time, it's actually brilliant
Firefox - need I say more
Firebug plugin for Firefox - web developers dream
Apache - ditto
WordPress - more dittos
OpenOffice - just as stable as MS Office and it can open & save Microsoft files too

There are so many others that I use but I can't remember them all off the top of my head. Hope that helps.

Tom