Free Design Tools: Software Applications for Drawing, Photo Manipulation, Web Development, Graphic Design and More

Overview:

First of all, your best bet on designing some rich content and manipulating images for free is to move over to the free Linux Operating System. Linux is freely available from hundreds of different groups with different packages, but the one you should use if are not exactly computer savvy is Redhat. Rehat comes with GIMP, K-Office Vector Drawing Progams, and more.

Image Manipulation

WinGimp
WinGIMP is a Windows-port of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. This site contains information about downloading, installing, using, and enhancing the Windows version of the GIMP.

Open Office Draw
Part of the amazing and free Open Office Suite, DRAW will produce everything from simple diagrams to dynamic 3D illustrations and special effects.

IrfanView
IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP.

Web Design

Mozilla Composer
Mozilla has been called the best internet suite out there, and it comes with an amazing, very robust What You See Is What You Get web design utility. I am a professional web developer and I prefer mozilla! Also read this tutorial.

Trellian WebPAGE
Trellian WebPAGE is a free WYSIWYG web editor with a drag and drop interface, a preview screen that allows you to see your page under three common screen widths (640, 800 and 1024), built-in FTP uploader, table creation wizard, form creation tool, etc. It also has a syntax highlighting HTML editor for people who may want to switch to the HTML mode for some fine tuning.

Amaya Web Browsing and Authoring
Amaya is an open source browser and WYSIWYG web authoring environment that purports to allow its users to develop web pages without knowing anything about HTML or CSS. You can create your pages, view them, and upload them to your website using this software. It supports CSS (including CSS 2), HTML, XHTML, MathML 2.0 (which allows you to browse and write web pages containing mathematical symbols), etc. There are versions for Windows (a separate one for NT/2000/XP and 95/98/98SE/ME), Linux and Sparc Solaris.