Creative Themes Design

7 Free Creative Design Tools for Professional Designers

06/29/2010  |  Category: Blog, Creative Designs  |  166 views  |   Print This  |   Email This  | 

We get so many emails every week on what tools we use for our Creative Design work & if there are any good Free Creative Design Tools available that can be used to create Professional Web Designs.

The answer is Yes. We have often depended on some of these awesome Free Creative Design Software (and we still do at times). Some of these tools are online, while some can be downloaded onto your computer & used offline.

These Free Creative Tools are most helpful when you are working outside your office & do not have access to all the high powered computers & memory hogging software to do the job.

These free software are light, delivers quality output & best of all, completely free. You can use them on computers with as low as 1 GB of RAM & they will still work great – something very vital especially when you are traveling with your work!

1. Free Adobe PhotoShop Substitute – GIMP. GIMP is a free, open source digital image manipulation software that works very similar to Adobe Photoshop without the bells & whistles. Download GIMP here.

2. Free Office Software (like Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc) – OpenOffice. Open Office is very similar to Microsoft Office, except that it is free & completely portable. Much like MS Word, MS Excel, MS Powerpoint etc, Open Office has all the usual office management software. It was created by Sun Microsystems & now owned by Oracle Corporation but it is still available free of cost. Download OpenOffice here.

3. Free PDF Creator – there are tons of free PDF creators available. Since we use Open Office Software we do not need any additional PDF creator. Open Office comes integrated with PDF creator so that any type of file that you create with Open Office, can be converted into PDF simply clicking a built in PDF Converter icon.

4. Free FTP Software – FileZilla. FileZilla is a free, open source FTP software tool. It is extremely light & very easy to use. We carry FileZilla on all laptops, so that no matter where we are, we can keep uploading data & files on our web servers. Download FileZilla here.

5. Free HTML Color Picker – Pixie. This is a very small software program, but we depend so much on it. Pixie helps you know the exact HTML & HEX color codes of any color. Download Pixie here.

6. Free CSS Stylesheet Debugger – Firebug. This simple tool saves us hours of debugging work when it comes to CSS stylesheets. It is a small add-on to Mozilla Firefox browser & it will navigate through any web page to help you create, modify & debug CSS stylesheets. Download Firebug here.

7. Free PHP Server – XAMPP. This is another free, open source software that is very fundamental to our business. XAMPP helps you to emulate a PHP engine, complete with MySQL Server, SMTP server to test & run PHP websites. This is a great tool for all WordPress, Joomla & Drupal Theme designers. Download XAMPP here.

Though these tools are free, they deliver exceptional quality output. Most of them are very light & can run on not-so-powerful computers (we run all of them, together on an Acer Netbook!) and you won’t feel a difference.