- Krita - Open-source painting program. Pretty slick and developing a big following.
- GIMP - Or GNU Image Manipulation Program. Photoshop if it were designed by Linux engineers. Always been an ugly interface, but it has lots of power.
- See Non-Data Python for info on Pillow, a Python image manipulation library. Good stuff.
- Unsplash - "Beautiful, free photos. Gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers."
- Pexels - Free stock photos & videos
- Inkscape - Imagine Adobe Illustrator if it were designed by Linux engineers. Again, ugly interface, but plenty of power.
- Undraw - A constantly updated design project with beautiful SVG images that you can use completely free and without attribution
- Humaaans - Mix-&-match illustrations of people with a design library
- Adobe XD - Finally available for all editions of Windows 10, this is pretty legit. I can't believe Adobe is giving it away for free. Update: Adobe is putting restrictions on free plan, like ending local storage in April 2020)
- Canva - Collaborative group design and brand editor.
- MockFlow - Pretty easy to use wireframing/prototyping tool. Good if limited free plan (only 3 mockups allowed).
- Miro - Online collaborative whiteboarding platform.
- Overflow - "User flows done right." Here's an example.
- Figma - Doesn't have UI components built-in like MockFlow, but for making quick drawings, sharing them with team members, and having everything sync beautifully online/offline, it's really pretty good.
- Pencil Project - Undergoing a major overhaul to make it a more modern system. Supposedly quite robust.
- Atomic
- Sketch - macOS digital desgin toolkit with a strong plugin community. Probably the most popular thing on here.
- Zeplin - Collaboration tool between designers and developers to share designs, assets, and measurements.
- Mural - Digital workspace for visual collaboration.
- Notely - Free sticky note application.
- Idea Flip - Web app for group brainstorms and individual ideas.
Also of interest may be this comparison from the Vox Product Team that's pretty useful.
Additionally, Lucid Meeting has a blog post that tests out and categories many of these design / collaboration tools.
- USWDS - US Web Design System - A comprehensive design system developed by the US Digital Service.
- HTML5Up - Free, responsive, nice-looking HTML5 site templates.
- Coggle - An offshoot of a mindmapping tool, this is a well-designed, easy-to-use flowchart tool. Nice free plan: 3 private flowcharts, unlimited public ones.
- DaVinci Resolve - To quote Engadget, "DaVinci Resolve 15 is a free, Hollywood-grade video editor." Incredibly powerful stuff. I kinda can't believe how much is in the free version.
- AutoEdit - Interesting concept. This thing will automatically generate a transcript of your video, then allow you to make selections from the transcript. The selections you make can be exported to be stitched together into a proper video. Apparently cuts down the video editing process immensely.
- OBS Studio - World-class open-source screen recorder / video streamer. Warning: can get funky on Windows Surface Books, etc. or anything with multiple graphics cards. Trust me. But it generally just really does the trick.
- ffmpeg - Incredibly powerful command-line video conversion tool. Like so:
$ ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.avi. As a more serious example, I recorded a screencast using OBS Studio as a.mkvfile, and wanted to make a GIF out of it. GIPHY Engineering blog helped me out, but it was pretty easy:- Generate a color palette
.pngfile using this command:ffmpeg -i '.\2020-01-07 10-26-50.mkv' -filter_complex "[0:v] palettegen" palette.png. - Use that palette as kind of a key/overlay from which to pull colors during the conversion:
ffmpeg -i '.\2020-01-07 10-26-50.mkv' -i .\palette.png -filter_complex "[0:v][1:v] paletteuse" 2020_01_07-screencast.gif
- Generate a color palette
- MixKit - Completely free stock videos, license free. They ask for attribution, if possible.
- Product Hunt has a good collection of $0 design tools, some of which are already on this list.