Open by design
From digital painting to desktop publishing, open-source tools are invading graphic design. Jim Thacker spoke to the artists using them to find out why.
For years, the worlds of illustration and graphic design were synonymous with closed-source technology and two closed-source technology companies in particular.
For software, graphic design meant Adobe, whose image-editing package became a verb in its own right – we might photoshop an image in the same way that we might hoover a carpet – and whose vector design and page layout applications, Illustrator and InDesign, became equally dominant in their own markets. And for hardware, the Mac laptop under the arm has become as much an emblem of the hipster designer as heavy-framed glasses.
But all that is changing. Open-source design software is now being used on some of the world’s highest-profile design jobs, from book covers for bestsellers to assets for triple-A games. Adobe still remains dominant in the design market – a quick search on the leading industry portfolio site, ArtStation ( https://www.artstation.com) returns over 27,000 results for Photoshop, compared with a thousand for Krita and 200 for Gimp. But thanks to the efforts of developers to create tools tailored to the needs of artists, rather than simply of interest to technologists, there are now serious open-source options for most professional design tasks. You don’t even need to run them on Linux any more, although, of course, we’d encourage it.
In this article, we will be looking at four of those options: as well as Krita and Gimp, vector design tool Inkscape and page layout package Scribus. We covered 3D art previously [see Features, p44 LXF204], and web design and photo retouching applications will have to wait for a future issue.
Along the way, we’ll meet artists using those open-source tools: both freelancers and employees of the world’s largest games and visual effects companies. Some were originally drawn to their chosen applications because they were free and others, out of a philosophical commitment to open-source software. But all have stuck with them because they are, quite simply, the right tools for the job.