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It depends what kind of images you are designing. For vector work: Inkscape For non-vector design and/or photo-editing: GIMP or Paint.NET (less advanced, but still very capable)

For a hand drawing one giving tons of control over stroke settings, and evolving, is MyPaint . Scribus , a layout/publishing tool, is told to be one of the very few supporting well CMYK. Indeed, some people do their design in Inkscape, and export to Scribus, so they do there the cmyk stuff, etc. And believe it or not, I have used Blender from time to time as ...

If you need a small number of barcodes, and have some time but no budget, it's simple to produce vector-based barcodes using an online barcode generator and Illustrator (or whatever your tool of choice is). For example, http://www.barcoding.com/upc/ will produce an EAN-13 barcode for you for free. The cool thing about their images is that they are snapped ...

I don't know much about barcodes, but I don't think this code is conducive to a typeface solution, because there seems to be an algorithmic process for creating the barcode. from wikipedia: To encode an EAN-13 barcode, the digits are first split into 3 groups, the first digit, the first group of 6 and the last group of 6. The first group of six is ...

Girlfriend has a TV show on a volunteer based TV Channel. We have had a friend do the logo for free, as for him it was also good publicity (name in credits) and looked good in his portfolio. If we needed more work, where could we ask? The show is volunteer based and and a media outlet. You could probably find someone to do graphic design ...

DA01 is correct; there's almost no way to transition gracefully and resentment-free from pro bono to paid with the same clients. Possibly if you made a big splash about starting your own company, with a suite of stationery and a website and a literal shingle outside your door, and used that as a way to say that you can no longer afford to do volunteer work ...

I am not sure this question actually belongs here since it's more of a nuts-and-bolts of video editing / exporting, but I'll give it a stab before it gets closed. Ultimately, YouTube videos are encoded as Flash, so one way or another you're going to end up with a Flash movie. Often if you're starting with Flash you're doing it because you want additional ...

"Where is the right place to ask for people to do free graphics work?" There is no one simple response to this. It's as much to do with the project as it is to do with locale. Consider: colleges and schools that offer courses in the skillset you require. You mention placing ads at the art college - that's a good idea. make sure any materials or efforts ...

Where is the right place to ask people to do GIS work? What about plumbing? Where can I ask people to re-roof my house? If you do a good job on my roof, I MIGHT have more work for you... As you can see, asking people to work for free is a bit of a silly concept. If you are running a non-profit you can usually find designers willing to donate their time to ...

Simon, here's a bit of radical advice: don't ever ask anyone to do anything "for free." Ask, rather, if they're willing to help a good cause for something other than monetary compensation. There has to be some kind of fair exchange involved, otherwise at least one of the parties involved ends up feeling sleazy, and the other feeling ripped off. There are ...

You also raise the question of 'when' to transition, which is an important aspect to consider. Four questions that you may want to think about come to my mind: 1) is your portfolio good enough to attract paid work? Do you have evidence of that? 2) does the 'free' work you provide add increasing value to your portfolio? 3) does the 'free' work help you ...

The basic technique is to create a background color or gradient, add a 50% Grey layer above it with its blend mode set to "Overlay" and add some noise to that layer using whatever method your program provides. In Photoshop it's a filter, and I seem to recall it's much the same in the gimp. Adjust the amount of noise (which should be monochromatic) and ...

Although I've never used it myself, I came across http://www.idealist.org/ a couple of years ago. There are volunteer projects in all disciplines on there, mainly for charities, graphic design included. Here's a graphic design listing as an example: http://www.idealist.org/view/volop/BW8gSNNb8tnp.

I have advised my gf to perhaps put up posters at the local arts uni. Also try to look for student graphic design clubs/organization within a university. A lot of the graphic design clubs are willing to do graphic design works for free to boost their experience and club portfolio.

This is relatively easy with ImageMagick's compare: $ compare -compose src Background.png Icon.png diff.png With your files, this would result: Although, convert gives you a broader control on the output, e.g. the threshold. Here a B&W version is created, which is more usable for masking, and then the spade is extracted using the created mask: $ ...

If you have Win7, just use Windows Movie Maker. It is a video editing program usually shipped with Windows that will do all you need. I used it for a similar thing here.