Design & Illustration
WireframeSketcher is, as the ‘sketch’ part of the name suggests, a design tool that can be used to put together rough layout ideas for program interfaces and web sites. A library of pre-made interface components – such as navigation buttons and address bars – are available to drop into place…
While there is a great selection of software that can be used to edit digital photo and create works of art from scratch, when it comes to working with the icon, there is far less choice. Icon Workshop looks to redress the balance, bringing many of the tools found in…
When choosing a graphics package it is important to select the right tool for the job. Opt for too basic a program and you may find that you do not have access to all of the tools you need, while opting for a program which is more advanced can mean…
Drawpile is a simple sketch tool with an unusual extra: you can share your canvas with other users, and all work on the drawing at the same time. The core drawing tools are as you’d expect. There’s a pen and brush, a line, rectangle and ellipse, they all support a…
FontCreator is a tool which can display existing fonts, let you modify individual characters to suit your needs, and design complete new fonts from scratch. The program is equally at home with both TrueType and OpenType fonts (and can convert OpenType fonts to TrueType). And it supports all the popular…
MediBang Paint Pro is a free cross-platform paint and drawing tool (a rewrite of FireAlpaca), aimed at manga artists but usable by anyone. There’s a strong core drawing engine with customisable brushes, pressure sensitivity, lots of layer controls and a pile of powerful tools. The free cloud storage and Windows/…
Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing tool that’s packed with all the layout features you need. Excellent import features get you started by helping you utilise the content you already have. So, for instance, the program can import PDF documents, OpenOffice Draw, EPS, SVG, PSD and other files. You can…
The days of drawing up plans using pen and paper are, for the most part, over. Design projects – everything from cars and consumer products to houses and apartments – are now large carried out in CAD (computer-aided design) apps. While CAD software has helped to make design and project…
Computer Aided Design tools are notorious for not only being quite expensive, but also being complicated to use. LibreCAD gets off to a good started thanks to the fact that it is available free of charge as it is an open source design tool. Despite the similarity in naming conventions,…
MediBang Paint Pro is a free cross-platform paint and drawing tool (a rewrite of FireAlpaca), aimed at manga artists but usable by anyone. There’s a strong core drawing engine with customisable brushes, pressure sensitivity, lots of layer controls and a pile of powerful tools. The free cloud storage and Windows/…