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Graphic Design: Design Tools & Software

This guide will help graphic design students with materials and resources for the Graphic Design programs

Books in Library & Galileo

Additional Resources & Links

ProofHub : is a wonderful proofing tool that allows design teams to manage their tasks with zero hassle. Clients can use this proofing tool to explain or request for minor changes to be made, such as adding color and shifting texts to the required portion of the design. 

 

Adobe Spark : Create graphics, collages, flyers, videos and animations that look professional in just a few taps.

 

Picsart101

Youtube video channel

 

Bittbox

The Freebie Gallery on the Bittbox website includes a vast selection of brushes and textures available for free download and use in Photoshop. Expect scratched backgrounds, paint blotches, wooden textures and loads more free design resources.

 

FDR

FDR stands for free design resources. As the name suggests this website is a library of  design freebies. Free Design Resources is a site dedicated to help you find the high quality design resources for free. Crafted with love from amazing artists and professional designers around the world.

 

GRAPHIC DESIGN RESOURCES 

Login required. Lessons for college level graphic design course

 

The AIGA Design Teaching Resource 

The AIGA Design Teaching Resource is a peer-populated platform for educators to share assignments, teaching materials, outcomes, and project reflections. Browse for inspiration. Sign up and starting posting projects.

 

Graphic Design Tool

Figma’s free graphic design tool makes it easy to incorporate design into the process of building digital products.

 

Crello 

Crello, a free design tool with powerful features and 50K+ ready-made .

 

Brilliant Graphic Design Tutorials & Tips to Inspire Your Creative Skills

Learn graphic design from these best tutorials and become a expert to design a logo, magazine, poster, or even a website. This is a collection of Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator and CorelDRAW tutorials. These tutorials, techniques and tips are very helpful to make the most stunning and realistic vectors and designs.

 

 Canva

Graphic design tutorials

Beginners guide to Graphic Design | 45 Episode FREE Series 

Welcome to this beginners guide series to Graphic Design by Gareth David Studio

 

The Futur Academy 

design tutorial videos on youtube

 

Shawn Barry, Creative 

design video tutorials

 

Graphic Design lessons

 

Graphic Design Photoshop Tutorials

Magazines/Journals

Creative Pro

 

Graphic Design USA

Monthly feature, design news. Northridge Library subscribes to the paper version of this publication.

 

Graphic Design & Publishing Center

Here you will find all kinds of resources relating to graphics, layout, design and typography.

 

Typographica. A Journal of Typography.

A blog for typography, described as "a journal of typography featuring news, observations, and open commentary on fonts and typographic design."

Picture

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop

Edit, composite and create beautiful images, graphics, and art on desktop and iPad.

Adobe

official website for Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator

 A vector-based program that allows you to create shapes and draw using the pen tool. Create amazing vector graphics and illustrations with the industry standard.

Adobe

official website

Adobe InDesign

Illustrator

Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign is the industry-leading layout and page design software for print and digital media. Create beautiful graphic designs with typography from the world’s top foundries and imagery from Adobe Stock. Quickly share content and feedback in PDF. 

Abobe

Official website and download link

Sketch

is the standard for digital designers. The program combines vectors with basic image effects making it a very intuitive program to use for designing apps and websites.

PicsArt

Picsart

Take your content to the next level with templates, fonts, stickers, & more!

Picsart

Official Website

Inkscape

Inkscape

Inkscape

Created by a non-profit organisation, Inkscape is professional quality vector graphics software that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. It’s open source and free to download.

video

EBooks from Galileo

Free Design tools

Canva

Canva is a graphic-design tool website, founded in 2012. It uses a drag-and-drop format and provides access to over a million photographs, graphics, and fonts.

 

DesignWizard 

similar to Canva, but includes all of its available tools in the free version. With over 10,000 free templates, you can easily create digital items such as social media posts and YouTube channel art, as well as print items like gift certificates and sales posters.

 

ColorZilla Color and Gradient Generator

 

Piktochart 

gives non-designers the ability to create basic infographics without relying on powerful design software like InDesign.  Choose from 400 templates, icons and graphics to get your message across.

 

PicMonkey 

your go-to free online tool if you work with photography in any capacity. Quickly resize, crop and color-correct your photos.

 

DesignBold 

another user-friendly graphic design tool for creating stunning images within a specified number of drags-and-drops. It has plenty of design resources including an enormous library of 12,080++ customizable layouts that will enable you to craft the design elements on your own. 

 

Vectornator

Vectornator empowers you to design anything you can imagine up to 30% faster. Create sophisticated illustrations, spectacular layout mockups, and expressive lettering on the go, whenever you want.

 

Genially

Genially is a powerful tool whose drag-and-drop editor allows users to quickly edit and create their own infographics. Creators can start from scratch or choose a template as a starting point.

 

Pablo

Pablo is the fastest and easiest way to create images for social media posts. It’s free to use and you won’t even need to sign in to start creating inspirational quote images, blog post headers, testimonial posters, or social media cover

 

GIMP

Short for GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP is a completely free image editor that provides all the tools you’ll need to manipulate your images. From retouching to restoring to creative composites, it also hooks up to third-party plugins to boost your workflow.

 

Inkscape

Created by a non-profit organisation, Inkscape is professional quality vector graphics software that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. It’s open source and free to download.

 

Remove

Need to remove the background from a photo? This free tool can do it surprisingly quickly, and it just takes one click.

 

Kartograph

 

Jashaka

 

Visme

Free Infographic Maker for Beautiful Infographic Design

 

HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.

 

Gravit Designer is a free full-featured vector graphic design app that works on ALL platforms. 

 

Vectr is a free graphics software used to create vector graphics easily and intuitively. It's a simple yet powerful web and desktop cross-platform tool to bring your designs into reality.

 

Crello

Claiming to be the "easiest online design tool to create animations and graphics for social and web", Crello is our new favourite website for our projects. You don't even need design skills to get started. There are lots to choose from as well with more than 4,000 pre-designed animated layouts alone.

 

Pencil

A free alternative to Adobe XD, Pencil is an open-source and powerful tool that allows you to design the prototypes for web, mobile and desktop applications. Available for all platforms. Perfect.

 

fotor

fotor isn't just a "design maker", it's a photo editor where you can crop, rotate, fine-tune, colour, resize or add effects to any image – all within your browser window. You can also create photo collages.

 

Pixel Editor X

Pixel Editor has a long track record as a basic but reliable photo editor that's free to use within the browser. They've just released a new version, Pixel Editor X, which is faster, has more editing tools and integrates with Dropbox.