Open Source Graphic Design Program

Open Source Graphic Design Program

Open Source Design Software
Open Source Graphics Software
Open Source Graphic Editor
Open Source Graphic Design Programs
Sometimes we need free Architecture or CAD software to redesign our own apartment's interior or want to decorate. Or just for learning purpose, here are some free and open source software for interior or house Architecture designers.
To name a free open source graphic editor which has been widely used by the graphic designers is Inkscape. The other listed features are: impressive set of 3D boxes tool create layer transparency effects and complicated shapes easily. Click Below to Subscribe watch more Free Software Reviews:can find download links and more inf.
Archimedes: An architecture open CADA strong alternative to Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape is another free and open source graphic design software program. It's a vector graphic editor that works for Windows, Mac, and Linux with a relatively simple interface and flexible tools for print, logo, and web design.
With DrawPad, you can easily draw and create all types of graphic design projects. If you are a beginner you can start with a pre-made template of many popular projects like logos, invitations, and banner ads. This fast and fun image composition and manipulation program works with both raster and vector images.
Archimedes is a free and open source CAD (Computer Aided Design) software built Eclipse's Rich Client Platform. It works on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows but before installing it, you have need to install Java Virtual Machine. The software and its plugins are under the Eclipse Public License which means anyone can modify its source code to develop its own application without the permission of Archimedes team. It develops as an alternate option to AutoCAD.
SweetHome 3DSweetHome 3D is an open-source software. It helps people to design the interior of their home in a very intuitive way. You can redesign your home and can see a 3-D version of how everything looks. It allows you to draw walls, rooms, windows, furniture, etc. You can create photorealistic images and videos with various light sources.
ArchiFacileArchiFacile is a free floor or house planner software which allows you to design them in two dimensional. This tool is very beneficial for architects as it allows to export design in PDF format. It can be used to plan floor, house, garage, wooden house, a garden shed or pool.
3D Home Design3D Home Design has a free version of its powerful software which enables users to create 2D/3D professional plans for indoor and outdoor views. Graphics are pretty realistic and make working with this software very enjoyable.
Google SketchUp MakeGoogle SketchUp is a free software which allows you to create 3D models in just a few minutes. There are lots of video tutorials available online which helps newbies. You can build your own house sketch design. Also, the sketch of your living room, a piece of furniture, model your city for Google Earth and more.
BRL-CADBRL-CAD is an open source modeling system and cross-platform CAD software. It has ray-tracing for rendering and geometric analysis, interactive geometry editor, analysis benchmark suite, image & signal processing tools, libraries for robust geometric representation, network distributed framebuffer support and more.
LibreCAD

Libre CAD is 2D CAD application that can read DWG files. It writes DXF files and can export files to other formats also such as PNG, JPG etc. It available in 20 languages and supports all major operating systems. (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and others). It provides you layers, blocks, splines, polylines, ellipse tools, advanced tangent line & circle tools, transformation tools, an advanced snapping system and more.
FreeCADFreeCAD is a powerful parametric 3D modeler for CAD, CAD, MCAD, CAx, CAE, and PLM. It extremely modular Architecture software that allows customization and use of extensions. It features Open Inventor-compliant 3D scene representation model provided by the Coin 3D library and a broad Python API. It uses the interface which built with Qt. It supports Windows, MAC OSX, and Linux platforms.
nanoCADIt is a free a Computer Aided Design (CAD) tool for Architectures. It has a user-friendly interface, drafting and design tools, native DWG compatibility, and an open API.
Blender Blender is the free open source 3D suite for beautiful content creation. It supports all major OS platform. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. The built-in Cycles rendering engine offers GPU & CPU rendering, Real-time viewport preview, HDR lighting support and Permissive License for linking with external software.
GenoCADGenoCAD is a CAD software for synthetic biology. This application provides a web-based tool to design plasmids, artificial gene networks, and other synthetic genetic systems composed of standard genetic parts. It includes a parts management system, a rule-based design tool, and a simulation engine.
TinkerCell -CAD for Synthetic BiologyTinkerCell is a software for synthetic biology. The visual interface allows users to design networks using various biological 'parts'. Models can include modules and multiple cells. Users can program new functions using C or Python.
Open Source Design SoftwareSailcut CADIt is a sail design and plotting software for Architectures. It allows you to design and visualize your own sail and compute the accurate development of all panels in flat sheets.
QCAD – 2DIt is easy to use, complete 2D CAD system for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It offers a complete set of general purpose CAD tools and uses the DXF format as its native file format. Additional power-user tools including DWG support and enhanced DXF support are available as QCAD Professional for Architecture through proprietary add-ons.
Also See:
How to work as a Graphic Designer without sleeping with AdobeI am just now completing a certificate in graphic design at the online school Sessions.edu, and although I have come to like the Adobe Creative suite tool (and mainly inDesign), I would rather be relying only on open source tools. Why? Well, there are many factors that steer my decision toward that.
If you want to read more about open source and creativity, I invite you to read FLOSS+Art which is a solid explanation of the relationship between open source and creativity/art. From the description:
'FLOSS+Art critically reflects on the growing relationship between Free Software ideology, open content and digital art. It provides a view onto the social, political and economic myths and realities linked to this phenomenon.'
This book has been a strong inspiration for me to embrace open source in all my creative projects.
Using open source instead of a licensed software is quite empowering and freeing. Even though I paid for Adobe Creative suite, I still don't feel that I own the software, which influences the way I create and express myself. Even worse, when I used to download pirated software, my creativity would be hindered by a feeling of guilt. All that lead me towards using only open source tools and their advantages:
+ Free software – meaning you don't pay for it (you still can donate what you want!)
+ The code is open, if you want your tools to do something different you are welcome to change it.
+ Solid community of users and developers to contact when in need
+ You can upgrade your software as many times you want (without paying more!)
+ Peace of mind for any copyright infringement or licenses / legal trouble with the tools you are using
There is a quality and peace of mind when using open source software that is hard to explain. It is often depicted as ‘If you can't open it, you don't own it' – which is not to be taken literally but which gives an understanding of the technology we use. This freedom is priceless; hence for me creativity and open source is a perfect match.
If you are to become a professional Graphic Designer, you still need to be familiar with the industry default tools, the Adobe suite. But once you're working on your own projects, personal ones or for clients, you can use the tools that fit your needs. Of course it's not the tools that makes the designer, only your skill and creativity.
I'll list here all the tools that I've been working with in the last few months, for school projects and professional contracts. I'll restrain the list to simply graphic design at the moment and might expand it further into web design in a future post.
Photoshop replacement with GIMPOne thing I like about this open source program is that they don't try to do everything. For example nowadays with Photoshop you can actually do pretty much all your design and illustration in there. But why is that? I personally prefer tools that do one thing, and one thing well. I guess that was the idea behind all the tools of the Adobe creative suite but the goal got lost in translation and now every tool tries to do everything.
GIMP is a great example of a tool that does what it does, and well! It's a really solid image retouching and photo editing software. It's a mature open source project with a huge community of users and developers. It's intelligently built and can be extended with Scheme or Python script!
Illustrator replacement with Inkscape and MyPaint
I've been using Inkscape more and more lately and I have to say that I'm in love again! With the focus on keyboard shortcuts and simple tool navigation, Inkscape became second nature quite easily. It's powerful and fast as well as quite flexible. It has a lot of the basic function of illustrator, but isn't overloaded with bells and whistles.
One thing that Illustrator tries to do but fails at, is to be a painting software. With its brushes and the pressure sensitive drawing, it almost works, but I really can't paint with illustrator. On the open source side of the world, the gap is well covered by MyPaint.
MyPaint is simple, elegant and to the point. It's optimized for tablets, and uses a minimum of control to change color (with a palette), change brushes and move your canvas around. It's the only tool that gives me the real feeling of drawing, and with the different paint brushes. You can easily create your own palette and your own brushes, or hack any brushes that came pre-installed.
InDesign replacement with Scribus
InDesign is a hard one to replace, maybe because I really enjoy working with it, or maybe because I haven't played enough in the open source world to have completely let go. The main, mature page layout tool available now is Scribus, you will find a similar interface as InDesign and it doesn't take long to get the basic commands. It's a solid page layout software, to design a poster or a whole book. Since I haven't designed any books with Scribus yet I can't tell how good or bad it is, but having used it few time I can see that it's a viable software.
I am also really interested in the development of CSS for designing books and print. Coming from a web design background it seems to make a lot more sense to code your style in CSS. You can read a really interesting experiment here on A List Apart.
Other useful toolsGpick, a quite powerful color picker which will also help you create color scheme and even try out the palette. You can download Gpick here.

Libre CAD is 2D CAD application that can read DWG files. It writes DXF files and can export files to other formats also such as PNG, JPG etc. It available in 20 languages and supports all major operating systems. (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and others). It provides you layers, blocks, splines, polylines, ellipse tools, advanced tangent line & circle tools, transformation tools, an advanced snapping system and more.
FreeCADFreeCAD is a powerful parametric 3D modeler for CAD, CAD, MCAD, CAx, CAE, and PLM. It extremely modular Architecture software that allows customization and use of extensions. It features Open Inventor-compliant 3D scene representation model provided by the Coin 3D library and a broad Python API. It uses the interface which built with Qt. It supports Windows, MAC OSX, and Linux platforms.
nanoCADIt is a free a Computer Aided Design (CAD) tool for Architectures. It has a user-friendly interface, drafting and design tools, native DWG compatibility, and an open API.
Blender Blender is the free open source 3D suite for beautiful content creation. It supports all major OS platform. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. The built-in Cycles rendering engine offers GPU & CPU rendering, Real-time viewport preview, HDR lighting support and Permissive License for linking with external software.
GenoCADGenoCAD is a CAD software for synthetic biology. This application provides a web-based tool to design plasmids, artificial gene networks, and other synthetic genetic systems composed of standard genetic parts. It includes a parts management system, a rule-based design tool, and a simulation engine.
TinkerCell -CAD for Synthetic BiologyTinkerCell is a software for synthetic biology. The visual interface allows users to design networks using various biological 'parts'. Models can include modules and multiple cells. Users can program new functions using C or Python.
Open Source Design SoftwareSailcut CADIt is a sail design and plotting software for Architectures. It allows you to design and visualize your own sail and compute the accurate development of all panels in flat sheets.
QCAD – 2DIt is easy to use, complete 2D CAD system for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It offers a complete set of general purpose CAD tools and uses the DXF format as its native file format. Additional power-user tools including DWG support and enhanced DXF support are available as QCAD Professional for Architecture through proprietary add-ons.
Also See:
How to work as a Graphic Designer without sleeping with AdobeI am just now completing a certificate in graphic design at the online school Sessions.edu, and although I have come to like the Adobe Creative suite tool (and mainly inDesign), I would rather be relying only on open source tools. Why? Well, there are many factors that steer my decision toward that.
If you want to read more about open source and creativity, I invite you to read FLOSS+Art which is a solid explanation of the relationship between open source and creativity/art. From the description:
'FLOSS+Art critically reflects on the growing relationship between Free Software ideology, open content and digital art. It provides a view onto the social, political and economic myths and realities linked to this phenomenon.'
This book has been a strong inspiration for me to embrace open source in all my creative projects.
Using open source instead of a licensed software is quite empowering and freeing. Even though I paid for Adobe Creative suite, I still don't feel that I own the software, which influences the way I create and express myself. Even worse, when I used to download pirated software, my creativity would be hindered by a feeling of guilt. All that lead me towards using only open source tools and their advantages:
+ Free software – meaning you don't pay for it (you still can donate what you want!)
+ The code is open, if you want your tools to do something different you are welcome to change it.
+ Solid community of users and developers to contact when in need
+ You can upgrade your software as many times you want (without paying more!)
+ Peace of mind for any copyright infringement or licenses / legal trouble with the tools you are using
There is a quality and peace of mind when using open source software that is hard to explain. It is often depicted as ‘If you can't open it, you don't own it' – which is not to be taken literally but which gives an understanding of the technology we use. This freedom is priceless; hence for me creativity and open source is a perfect match.
If you are to become a professional Graphic Designer, you still need to be familiar with the industry default tools, the Adobe suite. But once you're working on your own projects, personal ones or for clients, you can use the tools that fit your needs. Of course it's not the tools that makes the designer, only your skill and creativity.
I'll list here all the tools that I've been working with in the last few months, for school projects and professional contracts. I'll restrain the list to simply graphic design at the moment and might expand it further into web design in a future post.
Photoshop replacement with GIMPOne thing I like about this open source program is that they don't try to do everything. For example nowadays with Photoshop you can actually do pretty much all your design and illustration in there. But why is that? I personally prefer tools that do one thing, and one thing well. I guess that was the idea behind all the tools of the Adobe creative suite but the goal got lost in translation and now every tool tries to do everything.
GIMP is a great example of a tool that does what it does, and well! It's a really solid image retouching and photo editing software. It's a mature open source project with a huge community of users and developers. It's intelligently built and can be extended with Scheme or Python script!
Illustrator replacement with Inkscape and MyPaint
I've been using Inkscape more and more lately and I have to say that I'm in love again! With the focus on keyboard shortcuts and simple tool navigation, Inkscape became second nature quite easily. It's powerful and fast as well as quite flexible. It has a lot of the basic function of illustrator, but isn't overloaded with bells and whistles.
One thing that Illustrator tries to do but fails at, is to be a painting software. With its brushes and the pressure sensitive drawing, it almost works, but I really can't paint with illustrator. On the open source side of the world, the gap is well covered by MyPaint.
MyPaint is simple, elegant and to the point. It's optimized for tablets, and uses a minimum of control to change color (with a palette), change brushes and move your canvas around. It's the only tool that gives me the real feeling of drawing, and with the different paint brushes. You can easily create your own palette and your own brushes, or hack any brushes that came pre-installed.
InDesign replacement with Scribus
InDesign is a hard one to replace, maybe because I really enjoy working with it, or maybe because I haven't played enough in the open source world to have completely let go. The main, mature page layout tool available now is Scribus, you will find a similar interface as InDesign and it doesn't take long to get the basic commands. It's a solid page layout software, to design a poster or a whole book. Since I haven't designed any books with Scribus yet I can't tell how good or bad it is, but having used it few time I can see that it's a viable software.
I am also really interested in the development of CSS for designing books and print. Coming from a web design background it seems to make a lot more sense to code your style in CSS. You can read a really interesting experiment here on A List Apart.
Other useful toolsGpick, a quite powerful color picker which will also help you create color scheme and even try out the palette. You can download Gpick here.
Another color management tool with Agave.
For font management in Linux: font-manager and fontforge.
Image batch processor Phatch.
Open Source Graphics SoftwareI enjoy being able to measure what is on my screen and I can do that easily with ScreenRuler. It takes a few steps to install, but it's worth the time investment.
Open Source Graphic EditorSometimes you need to write without Facebook, email and Skype disturbing you every second. In order to do that, I love to use PyRoom, a really simple distraction free writing tool.
Open Source Graphic Design ProgramsOne thing with open source is it's maturing all the time, the community is growing and it's the counter current of the huge software companies that are mainly preoccupied with profit. The difference between using open source software and paid software has quite an effect my creativity and I invite you to try it out, and observe how it feels!