Hot answers tagged software-recommendations
18
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)
13
Wow thats crazy. First of all, would you go to your doctor and insist on which tools he used to perform your surgery? Or your dentist?
Or would you take your car to your mechanic and tell them which tools he should use to repair your alternator?
Of cours not. And your clients request that you use a particular tool over another to perform your job is just ...
8
For twigital the designer(Chris) used Illustrator, a grid and the 3D Rotate tool. Notice it has presets for isometric rotations.
If you need more than what Illustrator provides by default, try the CADtools plugin for Illustrator, which provides tools for isometric drawing and dimensioning.
I've got a few more resources to share.
Based on this tutorial ...
8
Designing infographics is a large portion of what I do. Here's a rough breakdown of what I use.
Probably 95% of the work on infographics I do is in Illustrator. You'll want to keep everything in vector format as much as possible because accurate scaling, aligning, grouping, tweaking and changing are so important. Illustrator has a few features that make it ...
7
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 ...
6
Illustrator
Creating curves and complex shapes is what Illustrator excels at. To that end, it makes a
lot of sense to use it when creating icons and such from scratch, or when vector format is a requirement.
Photoshop
By contrast there are a lot of photographic effects that Illustrator is not so great for, and you may actually have to import whatever ...
6
ImageMagick is the most awesome and powerful CLI image editing tool I know. It runs on most operating systems.
For desaturation, it looks like a -colorspace gray is the tool of choice but desaturation is apparently a more complex topic than one might think. There is a discussion on the right method(s) here
There are examples for posterizing in the docs:
...
6
The starting point, as DA01 says, is to put a bit of physical order into the chaos. The first step is mapping out the categories that are important to you, letting that list guide the physical arrangement of assets on your system.
In my case, I have stock photography in its own folder, and within that I have folders for broad categories that are useful to ...
6
Hazel for Mac could automate a lot of the copying for you, which could be used in conjunction with Dropbox. Like all things that sync, there might be some situations where you'd want to merge or have some other logic happening, but it might not be possible with that setup — I think the best it could do is blindly copy based on date modified.
...
6
I used dreamweaver for years, and I must confess I mainly did it because inserting images and tables was terribly easy (just drag and drop), and the link between the html and the css could be done in the same page. But a WYSIWYG editor will almost always give you errors. You might not notice them if your pages are simple, but the second you want to do ...
6
Layers Magazine had a good article on this a long time ago when I wondered the same question.
Step 1 Begin with the Product Art
For this tutorial, we created the artwork for the box in Photoshop that we’ll apply to a 3D object in Illustrator. The art consists of three separate flattened PSD files that we’ll place in Illustrator. The file for the front ...
6
I love LaTeX. That said, I've had great success using InDesign for professional quality typesetting with minimal effort. This is especially the case when I'm working with others since -- as you've noticed -- designers with LaTeX skills are approaching unicorn territory.
If you've never used InDesign before it might not immediately qualify for your criteria ...
5
Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. These are desktop publishing programs, which are designed to do exactly what you want to do (among many other things): lay out printed pieces like a magazine.
5
In professional design circles, "layout" and "Word" don't generally appear in the same sentence unless accompanied by various expletives unsuitable for a public forum. So it's not hard to get better than that.
What's best for you very much depends on your needs. You're asking professionals for an opinion, and naturally enough we tend to suggest the tools we ...
5
Illustrator for the charts. Depending on what else is in your infographic, you could either use Illustrator or InDesign for the non-chart materials. Illustrator can be used for basic to moderate layouts, and it's certainly fine for a one-sheet poster. Once you get into multiple pages, you're probably better off with InDesign.
5
There's a link to the "home wiki" where I found this.
What software edited the animations?
Didn't completely understand your question... Did you mean what
graphic editor I used to create animations? None at all.
I used MSVC++ to write a little program that calls some GDI+ functions and draws a multi-layer TIF picture each layer of which is a
...
5
That's a tall order for a free app. A well developed app that is going to provide you with a viable/enjoyable alternative to natural media is unlikely to come cheap. That said, some people have said nice things about ArtRage -- not free but cheap.
Corel Painter is hard to beat for natural media look and feel and it's not owned by Adobe! It works very well ...
4
There are several ways to fake this (very, very convincingly) in AfterEffects; I would suggest that. If you're using a raster image it'll be more difficult but what you'd essentially do is use the scribble and paint effects to fill in areas. If you have vector art (or can convert it to vector art using something like Live Trace in Illustrator) you can ...
4
Software is not an important concern. The most important concern is: can you draw? Since you are "totally newb at visual art" I assume that means you are not good at drawing and need to start with that.
Realistically, if you are already a game programmer then stick to that and find a good artist to work with. There are always lots of artists looking for a ...
4
Adobe Illustrator actually has some very under-utilized capabilities to enhance chart representations of data. There's a good tutorial by Mordy Golding here, and his Lynda.com tutorials also go into this in excellent detail. For the kind of work I do, I'll use Illustrator in this way, or build things by hand.
For inspiration, and to give you an idea of how ...
4
Many furniture makers use Sketchup which is a free software that used to be owned by Google. There is a strong community with interest in the woodworking world. Sketchup has an easy to learn interface and will get you producing working designs pretty quickly. Most 3d software is time consuming to learn and expensive to acquire. Check out the forums at ...
4
There are aspects of DW that could be useful for the client. They are CMS-like features that allow you to 'lock' parts of pages so they aren't easily messed with by others so that the client can use DW to make manual updates themselves.
You can also set up sites to use Contribute, which the client may wish to use.
I wouldn't recommend those solution, but ...
4
I use two Wireframing tools
Balsamiq mockups - Simple wireframing tool, fast to use, cheap, awesome. http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups
AxureRP - Complex, very complete, almost a working web app, expensive, awesome. http://www.axure.com
Have fun :)
4
This actually looks like you might be able to do with something like inDesign or Illustrator - just create a text block, enter your text, and add / move points to the text box shape until you have your desired shape.
Or...
create your shape in Illustrator, click on the shape, and enter / paste your type.
4
"I want Raster+Vector"
The primary alternative would be to use a raster illustration program and a vector illustration program. Common in the industry would be Photoshop + Illustrator. For open source, maybe The Gimp + Inkscape.
Alas, Fireworks doesn't really have any direct competition. It is/was a tool designed specifically for on-screen graphics with ...
4
If your needs are that simple, you can probably do what you need using the free, web-based and popular http://pixlr.com/ which supports PSD files.
It has a simpler interface and gentler learning curve for people familiar with photoshop than the obvious other free alternative GIMP (which you could always download any time you needed any more features or if ...
4
Version Cue, in my experience, is garbage. I have two systems for two different teams going right now.
SVN via Cornerstone
I've been running a large volume of creative work through SVN via Cornerstone for Mac for over a year now. It's a very slick and easy to use app that makes VC seem easy. It doesn't provide visual previews of the files like I believe ...
4
boxshot.com
Boxshot is dead simple. All you need is a flat image for each side of the package. It's not free though. It allows for complete 3D environment controls with reflections shadows and specular lighting. Will save, to most raster formats. It will not create vector formats.
Price tag is worth it here, but may not be for others.
3
Photoshop and Illustrator are more then enough for what you are trying to do. I would suggest mastering those tools first instead of learning other tools. You mentioned that you are about to spend more time learning graphic design, you do not need to learn tools for this. If you really want to learn graphic design then buy a good book. Please note that I am ...
3
The main tip I would give has nothing to do with the software actually. It is simply to scan in black-white bitmap mode. That's where there are absolutely no shades of grey in the image; all of the pixels are either pure white or completely black. Assuming you're scanning at a very high resolution, the aliasing won't be apparent and the lines will be ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
