Professional design suites are excellent tools for pretty much any design project and in the right hands they can unlock untold creativity. The big drawback is usually their initial cost, intense feature set, and ongoing regular upgrade costs which can often put them out of reach of a cash restricted user or a small/medium enterprise on a tight budget. There are also times when a smaller simpler set of functionality can be utilised for those times when one off or ad-hoc projects are required. Fortunately, there are a number of alternatives available on the web that can be used to help with this process and some of these are highlighted here.

I previously talked about ColorBlender, a website that helps you choose sets of complementary colours (blends) based either on a given colour, a set of predefined colours, or a completely random set. Now, you have a great colour scheme you should think about typefaces. Linotype and Adobe have some serious font collections for you and there are many free font sites out there including creamundo.com where fonts can be previewed with custom text. If you are feeling quite creative you could create your very own font using FontCreator but be prepared to invest some serious time.

For putting pixels on the screen, Paint Shop Pro remains a firm favourite at a reasonably low price, and the well loved Linux based GIMP offers a free solution with image manipulation facilities; to express your experimental creative side you could also try Cubescape. Capturing screen shots from your desktop can be useful and MWSnap has the answer. If you prefer instead drawing geometrically with lines and shapes you could convert your image to a vector file using Vector Magic or create your vector image from scratch using Inkscape. You may also need to convert between file formats, which is where online services like Zamzar can come to the rescue; once you have a large image ready to send you may find SendThisFile handy. While on the subject of sending large files it may be worth checking out your broadband speed using a good broadband speed tester.

For design inspiration there are a huge array of sites to visit from Ads of the World through Design Flood (and of course Just Create Design – you owe me one Jacob!) to DarkEye and DesignFlavr. A word of warning though – don’t be too inspired by designs you see or be tempted to use images or parts of images without checking their license usage – you don’t want a copyright infringement notice sent to you.

These sites are well worth checking out and I use a number of these sites for the creation of my online cartoons at www.monkandhisitjunk.com and www.bevandcatey.com.

The software described above is only part of the solution though; there really is no replacement for a good skilled designer, who for regular or mission critical projects can undoubtedly save you time and money in the long run, so it is always worth talking to someone before you embark on a project of your own.

This article was created as part of Jacob Cass design group writing project. The project has been created to celebrate the first birthday of Jacob’s blog – there are a number of prizes to win and any money raised goes to the Blog Action Day Poverty Fund.