This, my loyal readers, my dear friends, my fellow creative professionals, is the last installment of the “Free for All” column on CreativePro.com. I’m sure CreativePro.com will still publish about free tools and resources and I may find the column “Free for All” a new home in the future, but for now, this is good-bye to the column. To commemorate this last installment of “Free for All” on CreativePro.com I wanted to do something special. I went back to the beginning—to the alpha freebies, if you will—to what started this whole thing, way back in 2008. So as a nice little bookend to the run of this column, I’ve rewritten that first article here. I checked every freebie, removed any of the tools and sites that are no longer with us or no longer offer anything compelling for free, and replaced them with new free tools that do similar jobs—the latest, or omega, freebies. Each freebie is in a category of utility crucial to modern creatives and freelancers.
Alpha and Omega: The First and Final Freebies
When I pitched the idea for this article I thought it would be a relatively easy assignment. I thought: “heck, I personally use more than 10 free online tools other designers should know about, I’ll knock this piece out in no time.” Boy was I wrong! I know of so many great tools that fit the criteria that it was terribly arduous to pare the list down to only 10!
I had to choose only 10, and I chose based on greatest utility and broadest appeal. When that still left me with a very long list, I threw darts. (What? You want a mysterious explanation that makes me sound sagacious and inspired, or do you want the truth?)
Below are the 10 best free online tools designers should absolutely know about (and probably begin using right away), at least as determined by the throw of the darts.
1. Lorem Ipsum Generator
Sure, InDesign, InCopy, and QuarkXPress have built-in filler-text generators, but they only do paragraph type (without some work on your part). Moreover, few (if any) of your other design tools will generate placeholder text for you. Enter the universal solution to the problem: the Lorem Ipsum Generator. Available free and in 32 languages, the Lorem Ipsum Generator will produce placeholder text of any length you want simply by specifying the number of paragraphs, words, bytes, or lists. Bonus feature! Learn the true history behind Lorem Ipsum.
2. Color Inspiration and Community
Before Adobe Kuler there was—and still is—Colour Lovers. Colour Lovers is similar to Kuler in that you can create, share, and discuss color palettes, but it’s like Kuler all grown up. Both services allow you to create color palettes from scratch or from an uploaded image, and then tag, share, and discuss your palettes and others’, but Colour Lovers boast even more impressive features.
The second biggest advantage of Colour Lovers is the inclusion of patterns: It isn’t just colors and palettes that can be created and shared, but also patterns of colors, many of which were inspired by palettes shared in the community. Enhanced search capabilities make it easier to find colors, palettes, and patterns by hue, Web Hex color value, date, keyword, or popularity. And, the biggest advantage over Kuler, is the ability to download palettes not only in Adobe Swatch Exchange ASE format, but also as a Photoshop, Illustrator, or GIMP document, and HTML file listing the colors in Web Hex values, or even a Zip archive. Kuler offers only the ASE format.
Although Kuler boasts a better color mixing interface, the extra features of Colour Lovers nudges it ahead of Kuler in my (swatch) book.
3. Invoicing & Billing
FreshBooks is free invoicing and invoice tracking service. You can send invoices via email or have FreshBooks print and snail mail them. The basic account is free and allows you to manage three clients concurrently, but emails you send through the system are branded with an ad for FreshBook itself. To get rid of the ad, increase the number of clients you can manage, or…
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on July 23, 2013
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