For the Artistically Challenged – Free Graphic Design Software!

The first bit you need to know is where to find the raw materials for your graphic design software. You may want to check out these free online graphics, and you’ll definitely want to make use of the free pictures offered at those sites. Those are just the raw materials though! With the free graphic design software listed below, you can bend the raw material you uncover at those sites offering free online graphics, and make them better suit your site’s purpose.

Custom graphics – for free?

Are you looking for a black box, something you can just dump raw materials in at one end, turn a crank, and admire the finished product as it exits the other end? There are some interesting solutions available to you – a variety of free graphic design software that requires only a tiny bit of imagination to create artistry you can tune to suit your site. These sites are very forgiving, and let you apply various filters and effects to your picture to see what the effect is, and just as easily let you back out of any experimental changes that don’t suit your fancy.

Some free graphic design software

Ribbet – You can upload images, make collages, add clip art overlays, speech bubbles, and text – and a lot more on Ribbet. You’ll find lots of capability for a free graphic design software site here. Jump in and poke around the site a bit – just don’t get lost! For a really simple example of what can be done with a picture of a clownfish swimming through an anemone’s tentacles, see the picture above, right.

Pixlr Editor is another piece of free graphic design software which lets you work with your own images or images available on the web. You can change colors within a picture, distort the picture by pinching it or causing it to bloat, and apply other special effects to your images such as blur and sharpen or using smudge or sponge tools. The usual suspects are also available here, such as text tools and a color selector you can use when color matching is really important. Have a look!

Feeling like having some fun with your photos? Take a look at Fun Photo Box, which lets you upload photos (or use some from Facebook). You can apply special effects to the photos, antiquing them with a sepia look, turn them to black and white pictures, or apply a variety of other effects. The site offers you the usual capabilities, such as cropping, resizing, and rotating your pictures – as well as letting you put frames around your picture or add goofy ‘stickers’ such as glasses, hats, mustaches, etc. Play around a bit and see if it suits your fancy!

You can find some unique photo effect generators at PictureToPeople.org, a site which lets you change photos to color drawings or cartoons, create mosaics of your photos, and a host of other effects. You can also make a corner of your pictures ‘curl’ up, as if to reveal what is below. In addition, the site lets you add frames or text to the photos and add a variety of other special effects. As with the other free graphic design software, you need to explore this site. It may be just the ticket for your graphics needs!

My go-to graphics design website?

[ms-protect-content id=”536″]One of the best of the free online graphic design sites is Canva.com, which lets you upload your own images or work with some of their free stock images. Note, that some of their images are not free – although those pictures are clearly indicated. You can also upload you own images without charge, however – so go nuts with it!

Canva shines when it comes to providing templates for your use, and tools to manipulate the graphics once you’ve loaded them into the templates. The site goes beyond the normal free graphics design software, and includes banners, for presentations, for posters and for social media (Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Google+), for eBook covers and blog headers,… you get the idea!

You may find that Canva is a key part of the black box I mentioned earlier, a free resource that lets you crank out finished graphical creations you can be proud of. You don’t need to download any of the free graphics or learn to use the site tools at Canva, but take a quick look at them and see what they have to offer before watching the video below.

Here’s a video introduction to Canva. Take a look at the wide variety of things you can do with the Canva platform. It won’t do it all, but when combined with other platforms listed on this page, you can create graphical wonders! If you feel you’d like more inspiration, visit https://designschool.canva.com for more design tips!

Still more free graphical design software!

iPiccy is an online photo editor. Just create an account and go for it! You can fix photo colors, crop, resize, and rotate photos, even touch up photos you upload or capture with your webcam. You can also make collages or paintings à la Paint with the tools built in to iPiccy. For those who prefer to work offline, a quick download and installation of Gimp will let you manipulate pictures to your heart’s content – stretching and bending reality in ways only you can imagine.

Another option for photo editing, making collages, and making designer graphics is BeFunky. The site acts in many ways like an online Photoshop, letting you apply over 300 effects and filters to your photos. You can become your own Impressionist painter, your own cartoonist, or simply turn your photos into sketches – even if you have a hard time drawing stick people!

Yet another Photoshop-ish online graphical editor is Pixlr, which allows you to open images from your computer, from the web, or from Pixlr itself. The power behind this site is none other than Autodesk, the developers of AutoCad design software for engineers. As you might expect, Pixlr is fairly full featured, and allows you to manipulate your photos in hundreds of different ways. It is sites like this that have dispelled the myth that cameras never lie!

Are you feeling artsy? Tuxpi is another photo manipulation site that lets you add kaleidoscopic effects, change transparencies to “double expose” pictures, add frames and corner radii – and a host of other features. Just another site you can use to play with your site images before publishing them.

Visit this page again from time to time, as there are new sites being added occasionally, and new functionality for the sites already listed.

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Do you have a question or comment about free graphic design software? Add it to the comment box below and let it fly!