Scribus is a desktop publishing toolkit available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It has a good community and quite a few tutorials available on the wiki. Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation.

There are several good examples of applications created Laszlo and with the source code available to download here. It supports a rich graphics model with bitmaps, vectors, animation, movies, fonts and audio, as well interface widgets and graphical editing tools. Open Laszlo is a package that lets you write once and compile to both flash and DHTML.

There are several open source applications available that don’t really stack up against Flash in terms of functionality and user interface, but they can still be a very good starting point for creating rich media animation and 2D vector drawing. See also Aviary’s Raven vector graphics editor for online image editing. All file handling is performed natively in SVG file format. It supports Bezier curves, lines, freehand drawing, gradient fills, bitmap tracing. It’s not just for HTML and CSS, but supports over forty languages.įor FTP FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You should also consider Notepad ++ which is popular with coders. It has both a HTML editor and a CSS editor and allows you full control of layout as you work with your web design. Kompozer is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. See also Aviary’s Phoenix image editor for online image editing. Gimp can import native Photoshop files and can read scalable vector graphics (SVG) files. There is a huge supportive community around GIMP with many plug-ins to allow easy extension of it’s functionality. It has powerful painting tools, layers and channels support, multiple undo/redo, editable text layers. GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program started in 1995 and is probably the best known Open Source image editor. Fortunately there are many Open Source alternatives that go a long way towards putting together a solid suite of design tools. When you’re getting started with web design, industry standard software such as Adobe’s Creative Suite is often far out of your budget.

Open source alternative indesign