Griffith Littlehale: 5 Great Graphic Design Tools That Are Not From Adobe

Griffith Littlehale: 5 Great Graphic Design Tools That Are Not From Adobe

Adobe makes some of the best graphic design tools and continually updates them to remain at the top of the graphic design heap. Griffith Littlehale is an expert in graphic design and says that you do not have to spend big bucks on Adobe products.

Instead of spending big bucks on the Adobe Creative Suite, here are five great graphic design tools that are not Adobe products.

1. GIMP

Photo editing software is important for graphic design. Many of the best programs cost serious money, but GIMP is not. GIMP is a free professional photo-editing tool that you can use just like Adobe Photoshop.

GIMP is an open-source program for graphic design with a very friendly user interface. It is one of the most intuitive photo-editing programs available, and it costs you nothing. You can use it on macOS, Linux, Windows, and Solaris-based computing platforms and devices.

2. Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer does the same tasks as Adobe InDesign but for a much lower entry cost. Newer graphic designers will appreciate its relative simplicity as well as its affordability.

Affinity Designer provides you with a:

  • Grid system.
  • Dual environment.
  • Snapping feature.

The snapping feature is especially useful because it enables you to work on one screen while the other shows you the final result. You can create pixelated images and vector designs and see how they look right away. A zoom feature enables you to work on the very, very small to give your graphic designs impeccable detail, too.

3. Inkscape

Inkscape is another terrific program that costs you nothing. The vector graphics tool is an open-source program and works with a variety of other platforms. You can use it to integrate Adobe Illustrator files and use CorelDRAW to import other files.

There is a bit of a learning curve before you can be truly proficient with Inkscape. That it costs you nothing to install and use more than makes up for having a learning curve. And there are no vector graphics programs that do not have a learning curve.

4. Canva

The mostly free tool for graphic design only costs money when you need to download some of the more specialized templates and fonts that are available through Canva. You can download thousands of fonts, templates, and backgrounds that you can use to create your graphics masterpieces.

5. Sketch

Sketch is a great app for painting and drawing and gives you a very user-friendly toolset. It is a powerful photo-editing program and enables you to use a variety of plugins to optimize it for your needs. The app is free and has an active support community that helps you to get the most out of it.

Great Tools That Do Not Empty Your Bank Account

Griffith Littlehale highly recommends graphic designers and others who use photo editing and other commonly used tools to consider the preceding programs. They give you an outstanding value on highly effective and very powerful tools for graphic design. Griffith always is happy to share his expertise and insights into graphic design and where it is heading in the near future.