Good Design Can Come from Open Source Software

Being a web designer, most people assume that I have an arsenal of software in my toolkit that includes Adobe Photoshop, Illustratior and Dreamweaver and that I probably work on a Mac. We’ll, most people think I’m crazy and weird when I first tell them that I much prefer open source software and my real arsenal includes The GIMP, Inkscape and Eclipse/Aptana. Oh and I work in Linux. I had a co-worker once refer to me as a tech hippy.

So how is it that I came to be such a rarity in the web design community? It wasn’t always this way.

Don’t steal software!

When I first graduated college and entered into freelancing I was very against using software that I hadn’t purchased. Although it’s very common for people to use cracked copies, I had a previous life as a developer and refused to use illegal software. If Adobe and Microsoft want to treat their development efforts as proprietary and sell what they create, that is completely up to them – I can understand it. If I came up with something great and wanted to sell it, I sure wouldn’t want people stealing it.

So I started researching what was out there and amazingly there was plenty for me to work with. I became quite a user of The Gimp and Aptana and have completely turned my back on Adobe for the work I do as a freelancer. I prefer to not shell out $3000 for all the tools that I would need to do what I do.

Transitioning to Open Source Design Software

Most criticism of the open source design software comes from a familiarity with other products. Most people that look at the Gimp always say “It ain’t no Photoshop” and that can be true in certain aspects. Getting used to the interfaces and concepts laid out in other software always has a learning curve and had these critics learned other software first, they’d be complaining about these same differences. The GIMP, Inkscape and Aptana are all strong software packages filled with features that help me to create what I need and are not overloaded with tools that I’ll never use.

Most open source software also come with a great community of supporters who take the time to voice their input and ideas to improve upon them, contribute to documentation, education new users, and contribute to feature requests.

Crowdsourcing

I believe in the ability of crowdsourced projects, and only through a large community of the right people can open source projects progress. I don’t believe that 20 programmers sitting in cubicles developing software based on user feedback will produce as great a product as designers and developers directly getting involved with the progression of the software that they use every day.

There already has been much success with software like Apache and WordPress and there’s no reason why The Gimp and other design software won’t be regarded in the future as being just as successful. The communities involved in the progression of open source software are always more than willing to hear and address criticism of these projects. Anyone can being a part and join in.

When did this happen?

Another great part of open source design software is the frequency of new releases,. Its quite amazing how quickly people get involved and turn around new versions, something that most software companies could never do.

Google believes in open source so much that each year they put together the Google Summer of Code and help fund the development of new ideas and feature implementations. Developers submit their ideas every year hoping it’s good enough to get the backing of Google.

Design is Design

Using open source design software won’t make you less of a designer. If you look back through history, not all great artists had the best of materials to work with yet produced amazing work. Tools help actualize a designer/artist’s vision – not the other way around. A good designer could work with just about anything.

These are a Few of my Favorite Things

I’ve played around with a lot of open source software and the following is a list of the software that I couldn’t imaging living without:

Ubuntu Linux: operating system
OpenOffice: documents and spreadsheets
Free Mind: mind map/brainstorming
Dia: flow charts
The Gimp: design
InkScape: illustration
Eclipse / Aptana: coding
Text Pattern: web content management

Please Join in and Contribute!

I plan on continuing to use, test and contribute to these products and watch their evolution each day to become stronger and stronger. I also planning on advocating the use of open source in general and pushing designers to give these packages a try – maybe not to become every day users of them, but to at least get them to realize their potential and to question the worth of their current software.

So if you’re interested in taking another look, check out the communities for each of these projects for a mass of tutorials and resources.