The Best (Creative) Things in Life are Free

kim_hale (Photo credit: idccollage)

Seeking inspiration for your digital muse without resorting to your pocketbook or expending hours of searching to find a free equivalent? To those whom Courier, Times New Roman and Arial fonts are anathema maranatha, and line-drawn, “unstylized” clip art blasphemy, here’s an alphabetized compendium of the best open source and/or public domain resources for desktop publishers, photographers, web designers, graphic designers, and yes, even we lowly and highly underrated bloggers.

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FONTS

fontsquirrel.com

FONTSQUIRREL (www.fontsquirrel.com) The Holy Grail of public domain typefaces, FontSquirrel compiles professional typefaces that are 100% free for commercial use. Search by typeface name, popularity and recency. Web generator enables copy to be previewed prior to downloads.

google.com/fonts

GOOGLE FONTS (www.google.com/fonts) Enjoy quite a few drool-worthy open source typefaces that optimized for web usage. Search by typeface name, alphabet, characteristics, # of styles available, trending, popularity and date added. Preview copy by word, sentence, paragraph or poster.

HTML (WYSIWYG) EDITORS

w3.org/amaya

AMAYA (www.w3.org/amaya) This an open source project is a web editor hosted by W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium). It began as an HTML + CSS editor and has evolved to support XML and XML applications (e.g. XHTML family, MathML, SVG).

kompozer.net

KOMPOZER (www.kompozer.net) KompoZer is complete, intuitive and combines web authoring with web file management with WYSIWYG web page functionality. Available for Windows and Linux, KompoZer simplifies creation of professional-looking websites without learning HTML. IMAGE EDITORS

gimp.org

GIMP (gimp.org) GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is the extremely popular freeware alternative to Adobe Photoshop and offers premium photo retouching, image composition and image authoring capabilities Linux, OS X and Windows plus variants like CinePaint, GIMP classic, and GMP Portable.

splashup.com

SPLASHUP (splashup.com) formerly known as Fauxto, Splashup delivers real-time editing capabilities and photo management from anywhere you have an Internet connection. It is cross-browser compatible and integrates seamlessly with top photosharing sites like Flickr, Picasa and FaceBook.

PHOTO BANKS

pixabay.com

PIXABAY (pixabay.com)  Pixabay represents the efforts of photographers to show the world through their lens and is an extensive source for finding, sharing stunning and using public domain images for any purpose (even commercial) without attribution to the original author. Registration is free!

sxc.hu

STOCK.XCHNG (sxc.hu)  Acquired by Getty Images in 2009, Stock.XCHNG bills itself as the leading source of free photographic stock, with over 400,000 photos and illustrations from over 30,000 photographers. This collection is searchable by photos, users, camera, country, and city. Registration is free.

PORTABLE DOCUMENT CREATORS/EDITORS

cutepdf.com

CUTEPDF WRITER (cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/writer.asp) Developed by Acro Software, CutePDF Writer is the award-winning PDF tool that simplifies on-the-fly conversion to PDF documents. No watermarks, no popups. Works with Windows 8 (32-bit, 64-bit); includes support for 32-bit, 64-bit GPL GS.

pdfforge.org

PDFCREATOR (pdfforge.org) PDFforge’s PDF Creator is an award-winning, professional and intuitive PDF converter tool with document merge, email, encryption (digitally sign) features for Windows. It’s 100% clean — no adware, spyware or viruses.

VIDEO EDITORS

blender.org

BLENDER (blender.org) Blender delivers state-of-the-art premium features including rigging, character modeling, solids modeling, animation, rendering, raytrace rendering, UV unwrapping, shading, imaging and compositing, real-time 3D/game creation, camera/motion tracking capabilities, and more.

lwks.com

LIGHTWORKS (lwks.com) Billed as the fastest, most accessible and focused NLE in the industry, in the words of its creator, “Lightworks delivers Hollywood-strength editing” with unmatched format support, customizable timelines, trimming, stereoscopic support, project sharing, and more.