Full support for different colour modes means this is a viable alternative to Illustrator for both print and web design, and although the interface is somewhat simpler than Illustrator, its still possible to achieve extremely sophisticated artwork.

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Weve put our expertise to good use and listed the best of the best options to cover the basics of what youll need in your toolkit.

Free graphic design software: Quick links Vector art software Image editing software 3D software Data visualisation software Other useful tools Studying formally may not be necessary if you want to become a designer, but you do need to be familiar with graphic design software, which can be expensive.

Although free graphic design software wont give you a plethora of fancy features such as those found in Adobes CC ( get Adobe Creative Cloud here ) or Affinitys software, you might discover that with the right combination of the tools below, you can do almost any design job.

And choosing what you get for free means you can splash out in other areas, to combine free and premium tools.

Its also often easier to learn free, more basic graphic design tools than the more complex software and menus of the subscription-based or more expensive programs.

If you cant find what youre looking for here, our best digital art software and best 3D modelling software posts have lots of great options too, weve also got a roundup of the best places to find free vector art, and you could also check out our list of the best video editing apps.

Digital Design Software Download Here Gravit

Gravit Designer Gravit Designer delivers a full vector toolkit for free Platform: Browser, Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS Download here Gravit Designer is a full-featured vector design app from the company behind Corel Draw.

Its suitable for all sorts of design jobs, from screen, app and icon designs to presentations, illustration and animation.

Digital Design Software Plus Multiple Fills

With a clean and intuitive interface that adjusts itself as you need it, this free graphic design software packs a wealth of tools for creating detailed and beautiful vector imagery, including non-destructive booleans, a knife tool and path graphs, plus multiple fills and blending modes, and a powerful text engine.

You can use Gravit Designer online or download a copy to your computer; note that you automatically start out on a (free) trial of Gravit Designer Pro when you sign up, and once your trial is over you transition to the free version, but lose the Pro features unless you pay for a subscription of course.

You can export as PDF, SVG or bitmap, and you get access to the Gravit Cloud service that enables you to get to your work wherever you are.

See the full comparison between the Pro and free versions here.

Vecteezy Easy for beginners and powerful for professionals (Image credit: Vecteezy) Platform: Browser Use it here Vecteezy is a free, in-browser online editor, which allows you to edit and customise Vecteezys existing vectors or create vector designs from scratch.

Its incredibly easy to use and is surprisingly powerful for a free tool, with keyboard shortcuts and advanced transformations built into the feature set.

You need to create an account to save your work, and joining the pro version gets you a bunch more tools and resources.

Vectr Vectrs online options make it great for live collaboration Platform: Browser, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS Download here Available both as a browser-based web app and as a stand-alone desktop app, Vectr is a free editor for creating 2D vector graphics.

With all the vector features youd expect, plus a wealth of options for using filters, shadows and fonts, its versatile enough for day-to-day design tasks.

Its live collaboration and synchronisation options are particularly handy, as they essentially enable anyone to watch you design, live, meaning its really easy to create in tandem or send feedback.

This is a genuine alternative to Adobe Illustrator CC.

SVG-Edit Platform: Browser Download here If youre looking to quickly output SVG or edit an existing SVG file, there are a few online editors that will do the job just as well as Adobe Illustrator.

SVG (scalable vector graphics) is an open format that allows you to reproduce your Vector drawings programmatically, and one of the nicest projects is SVG-Edit.

This is built entirely on HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript without requiring any server-side processing.

So not only can you use it to create and edit documents, but as its open source you can also download and modify the code using one of the best code editors making your own version if you want.

The standard albeit basic toolset of every vector-image editor is here, and although its limited to the SVG format, its surprisingly capable.

Note that if youre not familiar with code, this option probably isnt for you.

Inkscape Free graphic design software Inkscape has very good SVG integration Platform: Windows, Mac OS, Linux Download here As with many of the free options available, Inkscape focuses on the SVG format as its primary file format.

This highly capable editor has a very good SVG integration, supporting many of the more advanced features that arent always available in other apps such as alpha blending, cloned objects and markers.

Digital Design Software For Mac