2025 a great year for designing with opensource!
If your are new to the design open source tools you're lucky, extremely lucky!
The status of the opensource design tools has never been so good!
- FreeCAD got release 1;
- Blender won an Academy Awards;
- Inkscape is getting CMYK support;
- GIMP 3 has been released;
- Scribus 1.7 devel is production ready!
If you are interested in learning about graphic and design, you can start learning with these amazing software that are already at a professional level.
You don't need to use proprietary software or to pay to start learning, if any acquintances of your say the contrary simply don't trust or listen to them, they don't know about this topic at all!
Posted in: s/DesignWithOpenSource
2025-04-21 · 1 year ago · 👍 lanterm, Nexy
13 Comments ↓
this year I make the leap to start using only FOSS graphic programs as a graphic designer, its hard learn so many new programs at the same time, and struggling to do basic things because I'm out of my comfort zone, but I feel so free now!
the tool don't make the profesional!
❄ freezr [OP/mod] · 2025-04-22 at 03:43:
Don't know if you do this for work or school, it requires time, a lot of trial and errors, and adaptation but eventually you'll learn how to get the same results.
Feel free to ask me here on Bubbles, I have experimented enough and collected enough information to share...
@freezr Good to know! For now im doing well enough watching tutorial everytime I don't know how to do something
you missed some:
- friction.graphics (released v1)
- graphite.rs
- krita
😉
as soon as you realize how unstable and slow some famous proprietary tools are, you become truly creative and fast... stop crying, do the switch and start chatting with the developers of the tools you are using!
❄ freezr [OP/mod] · 2025-04-22 at 23:40:
I did not mention, Krita because it has already bloomed, and among the illustrators is already well known.
Graphite is very promising but it is still in early development and it is a web app...
Friction: honestly this is the first time I heard about it... I'll take a look into it... 😉
friction is amazing.
did all the animations for the sxmo starteguide with it. feels a bit like blender, animated svg, the real deal 😎
❄ freezr [OP/mod] · 2025-04-23 at 21:52:
Yep, it looks very interesting!
I was left to Synfig and Natron for motion graphic…
I have a project and I think it can be a good opportunity to learn and use this software!
🚀 stack · 2025-04-23 at 23:14:
I've tried FreeCad but it was incomprehensible junk a year ago. It had an idiotic design flaw/bug, where deleting a point would get everything out of sync and references to objects became mismatched.
❄ freezr [OP/mod] · 2025-04-24 at 03:44:
@stack I am not very good with 3D in general, it is a skill that I have been constantly failing... 3D software are complicated, so It is FreeCAD. I've never done anything with it, however I patronize one of the guys that work on the BIM part. I do believe this software has the potential to become what Blender became for the animation and rendering. I follow its development closely, and the bug you're referring to has been solved; plus the UI has been improved a lot. I would give it another chance. In the mechanical industry it is a software that is well known and used, it does its job just fine! 😉
@stack
i know what you mean, it just works a bit different than autodesk. you should enable constraints and you have to set some of them manually. remember its a piece of free software, there exist a lot of documentain, before you rant, work your way through it.
🚀 stack · 2025-04-24 at 12:55:
@me -- it was hardly a rant!
Just pointing out a terrible flaw I personally encountered repeatedly in FreeCAD, one that prevents you from making changes to an object, and therefore, rendering it useless. Making changes to your design is a must.
@freezr, I am glad to hear they fixed it -- a bit late in the game. This is a pre-alpha kind of problem, leaving a bad taste for people. Nothing like seeing an almost finished drawing after putting in hours, but any change makes it whack out!
🪴 mstrmeow · 2025-04-25 at 10:07:
inkscape didnt have cmyk support until now? tbh i didnt need an extra way to pick a color, my mains were always hex, rgb and maybe a pinch of hsl
❄ freezr [OP/mod] · 2025-04-26 at 03:29:
...and still doesn't.
Martin is working on integrating capypdf in Inkscape to export PDF in CMYK...
This means that Inkscape won't work natively on CMYK but it will be able to export in CMYK based on the profile you select: the RGB color space will be converted in CMYK accordingly with the destination profile...