Web designers, digital signage needs you!

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Digital signage is the term for the displays you see in coffee shops, gyms, hospitals, schools, banks, and pretty much any other business or organization with a physical presence. Digital signage has a wide variety of uses such as providing information, generating sales, recognizing donors, etc. It used to be limited to large businesses because of the high costs of installing, managing, and creating content; but in the past 5 years or so, the industry has seen an influx of low-cost media players (the computers that power the displays) and content management systems (the software that puts the content on the displays).

You can now purchase a Raspberry Pi 2, use a free content management system, and an existing TV; and have a digital signage system for as little as $45. With the barrier to entry being continually lowered, it’s no longer just large businesses who are using digital signage. Mom-and-Pop shops are setting it up as well at an increasing rate.

Digital signage is…forecasted to grow to be a 20 billion dollar industry by 2020

There is a major hole in digital signage right now. The cost is down, it’s accessible, and it’s easy to use. But the content… let’s just say: it leaves a lot to be desired. Many businesses have content management systems that have drag-and-drop signage builders, but they’re not great. However, most of them also have the ability to either “schedule” web pages, or build them with HTML.

Digital signage is a big industry in its own little world. It’s forecasted to grow to be a 20 billion dollar industry by 2020, yet it seems like no one has heard of it. It is estimated that there will be 22 million active screens worldwide this year. All of those screens need content, and the proprietary platforms of the past are not doing a great job.

The good news is that if you’re a web designer, digital signage needs you.

Many web designers entered the field because they wanted to try something new. More than likely, you wanted to create interesting and engaging online experiences. Digital signage has opened a new challenge for you. You have the skills and ability now to create stunning digital signage experiences.

Building content for digital signage

Responsive web design and consistent user experience are some buzzwords that have been around for a while now. We already design for everything from phones to large HD desktops; why not expand to large format displays as well? A user should experience the same great web content and branding as they move from their computer, to their phone, and into a physical location.

Digital signage is unique though; and just popping a website on a display is not a very effective way of building a great experience. Digital signage content is dynamic. In many cases it needs to change based on location, time, season, etc. Building separate HTML pages that you can schedule depending on those variables is the easiest way of doing it.

For example, think of a restaurant chain with three locations, in three time zones, each with three displays. Two of the displays in each store are menu boards, and the other one shows a greeting message. When the restaurant closes, the displays show employee communications, such as calendars, company events, and important announcements. The menu boards need three different HTML pages for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the greeting screens all need content. The employee communications will also need their own content designed and built. Lastly, each store will need individualized content.

This content could be passive, meaning it slides through on its own, or you can create interactive content using touch screens. Incorporating social media campaigns, can also be a good way to engage viewers with passive content. And interactive content can be a very interesting way of creating cool digital signage experiences.

How do you get started?

To begin bringing your web design skills into the world of digital signage, start by signing up for a digital signage platform, to familiarize yourself with the software that sends HTML content to display screens. There are open source platforms, paid platforms, free platforms, and proprietary ones. Many of them allow you to use all the knowledge of web design that you already have and start building.

if you’re a web designer, digital signage needs you

There are a few ways to start building; it depends on what platform you chose. Here are a few different ways: You can build using widgets, or apps, which are the building blocks of sign content. There are widgets and apps for Twitter, financial data, news, weather and more. Another way is to use your editor of choice to build the content. When you’re done building it, publish it to a Github page or website, and then schedule that link in the platform to appear on your display. Lastly, you can build a page in your editor, and then move your HTML directly into the platform, if it allows for that.

Who do you sell to?

If you have any existing clients with brick and mortar locations, they are prime candidates for your display design services. If not, you can add digital signage as a service that you can provide to new clients. Picking a niche can also be a helpful way to grow clients: for example, be the expert on creating signage for restaurants, or dentists, or any other specific profession or industry.

The great thing about digital signage is that content needs to be updated regularly, which generates recurring revenue. With some platforms, you can easily train your clients to schedule and manage their own presentations. Alternatively, you can provide content updates as an additional service.

Conclusion

The digital signage industry is growing rapidly. Gone are the days of proprietary, expensive software. HTML5 has knocked down the door, so you can now create, manage, and display amazing sign content from the web. This is an amazing opportunity for web designers to expand their offering and differentiate themselves.

 

Featured image, digital signage image via Eugenio Marongiu / Shutterstock.

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5 easy ways to get fired from a design job

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Plenty of web designers are consummate professionals who strive to do the best for their clients and provide excellent service. These are designers who rightly have pride in their work and love what they do. Then, unfortunately, you also have the other side of the equation: designers who don’t care about making their clients happy, and therefore don’t provide good service. These are designers whose standards are poor.

Worse yet, from the client’s perspective, you can’t really weed out who’s who until you’ve hired your designer and have worked with him or her for a period of time. Sadly, by then, if it’s a designer with low standards, it’s already too late.

1) Delay your first draft

To make your client begin to doubt whether he should have chosen you as his designer, start to really take your sweet time with your mockups as you set off the development process in earnest. If you’d really like to sugar coat it, keep giving your client excessively optimistic estimates about getting the project done in just a matter of weeks.

Go from ensuring your client that you’re highly excited to get the site design or redesign project underway, to taking several weeks before you email him your first mockups of the new design iteration. Then, to add insult to injury, drag your feet just a little bit longer when your client asks (and know that he’ll always ask) you for some tweaks and minor changes to the initial mockup you sent over.

2) Re-prioritise your schedule

Now that you’ve planted the seeds of doubt in your client’s head, you’re well on your way to getting fired.

If the project you were contracted for should last through holidays like Christmas, be sure to neglect the project for the entirety of the holidays. After all, your priorities during festive seasons should be on things like recreation and hanging out with your friends or family. Never mind the fact that your client already paid you a hefty retainer…which you’re already using.

Then, perhaps because you’ve experienced a small pang of guilt, finally send your client an update email raising his hopes that maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to get the project done by the holiday’s end. Of course, to stay consistent with your plan to drive off your client in anger, make sure that you break this promise, too, as it was only ever false hope anyway!

3) Make the site live with blatant errors

When my old designer finally had a “finished” version of my old site ready to go live, approximately four months after the project began, he presented me with a site that had obvious problems that he apparently didn’t notice. That’s because he couldn’t have cared less. If he would’ve given his final creation at least the once-over, he would’ve noticed glaring issues like:

• broken links;
• images with uneven borders;
• lack of responsive design.

Plus, my email at my then-new URL wasn’t working at all, even though we agreed that it was part of his job to set it up.

By now, your client will understand completely that you were the wrong designer with whom to go. You’ve delayed the project numerous times; gone way beyond the earlier estimates of how long the project’s duration would take; been unresponsive in communication; and, to top it all off, presented your client with a sub-par work that needs significant corrections.

Hold on, though. If you think that’s the worst that designers can do, think again. There’s still one final action that you can take to absolutely ensure that your client will be completely upset with you and never return (not to mention, probably give negative recommendations about you).

4) Refuse to correct the problems

By now, you’ve very likely angered your client, and he’s likely not to come back to you for anything. To put the final nail in the coffin of your professional relationship with your client, simply never reply to his emails or text messages asking you to fix the glaring problems with the finished site. It doesn’t matter if the contract you and your client signed, as well as follow-up emails, expressly stated that you’d handle minor revisions. Just go for broke at this point!

 

5) Overpromise, then under-deliver

Needless to say, after my old designer finally did what he was supposed to do, and got paid for it beforehand, too, he wasn’t going to work with me anymore. I cut contact with him right after that and began looking for a new web designer/developer in 2014. Thankfully, I did find a highly talented and extremely professional designer in late 2014. My current site design is his great work. He’ll also maintain my site through the years, as well as handle any necessary site updates to respond to SEO concerns going forward.

Looking back on this nightmarish experience that really tested my patience on so many levels, I can say that my old designer’s problem was overpromising to put my mind at ease and hook me in—and then completely under-delivering on so many occasions. To put it into perspective, my old designer took about four months for a redesign while my new designer took a couple of weeks. The difference between the two is work ethic (or lack thereof) and pride in one’s work (or lack thereof).

In conclusion, just follow all the steps my old designer took if you want to provoke your clients and drive them away for good. I’m sure that, after you do that to enough clients, you won’t have a viable design business for long.

 

Featured image, fired image via Shutterstock.

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The value of accessibility

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What if I told you web designers out there that there are people who might visit your website that don’t care what it looks like?

Visually impaired people navigate the web for the same reasons we all do, to find information, to shop and to perform a myriad of important tasks using web-based applications. But visually impaired people experience the web differently and we need to be sensitive to their needs when we design and build websites.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.N. and World Bank over 47 million Americans, and up to 650 million people worldwide, have some kind of disability. Every visitor to the sites you design needs to be able to find the information they are looking for and perform the tasks they intended to perform regardless of what the web page or app looks like. A lot of different factors that go into the creation of the web page or application can impact accessibility.

You take the blue pill–the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill–you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. — The Matrix

Are you ready to go down the accessibility rabbit hold with me? We will need to dive into to the technical aspects of web pages. HTML is the skeleton of a webpage while CSS, JavaScript and images enhance the HTML. Often times visually impaired people miss out on all these enhancements. Although accessibility is mainly a developer task, sometimes the technical requirements required to preserve or enhance accessibility will affect the appearance of the website. That means that design, copy, user experience and development all need to collaborate to make sure that navigation controls, forms, buttons, headings, buttons, links, and more are accessible.

design, copy, user experience and development all need to collaborate to make sure that navigation controls, forms, buttons, headings, buttons, links, and more are accessible

People who are blind, visually impaired, illiterate or learning disabled use assistive technologies to navigate the Internet. Screen readers are the most common assistive technology for the web, these software programs attempt to interpret what is displayed on the web page and convey it to the user, usually through converting the text to speech but sometimes through a Braille output device. Screen magnifiers are also often used in conjunction with a screen reader. Typically a screen reader will attempt to parse the HTML from the top of the HTML file to the bottom and speak relevant elements to the user. Ideally the screen reader will allow the user to successfully move a virtual cursor down the page in order to fill out form fields, click buttons and make selections from drop-down menus and other controls.

To test thoroughly for accessibility you’ll need to ensure that the website or app performs well on each of the many screen readers available. There are several popular free and/or open source screen readers on each platform including JAWS, and NVDA. Microsoft users can use NVDA, while Apple computers and iOS devices come with Voice Over which can magnify keyboard controls and read screen contents, and for Unix devices there’s Orca. The Chrome browser has two assistive technology plugins, ChromeVox for screen reading and ChromeVis for magnification.

Most web accessibility problems occur when the screen reader’s virtual cursor becomes trapped in a poorly designed form or skips over an important control or an important piece of textual information. Verifying that websites are indeed usable is similar to browser testing because each screen reader has different requirements and limitations. This is why understanding the behavior of each screen-reader is important. The needs of various screen readers can be accommodated by adding various special HTML tags to the important elements of the page.

Modern dynamic web UI can be particularly problematic for accessibility because important elements are added to the page dynamically using JavaScript. Custom drop-down menus, modals, tooltips, accordion content and dynamic errors and notifications can be challenging for screen reader users to understand because of a communication breakdown between the HTML, JavaScript and the screen reader. Native HTML and JavaScript have no way to communicate page (Document Object Model) updates to the screen readers. Developers need to move “focus” (the screen reader’s virtual cursor) to the part of the UI that changed. When a modal opens up developers need to put the user’s focus on that modal so that the screen reader can read that content and the user can understand and interact with it.

WAI-ARIA can bridge the gaps between what the raw HTML of the page says and what sighted users see

This is done through the use of special HTML tags called WAI-ARIA tags. WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) can bridge the gaps between what the raw HTML of the page says and what sighted users see by providing a standardized way for developers to add extra meaning to states, properties, relationships, roles and live regions that a screen reader otherwise would not understand.  Developers can use aria-level to explain to screen readers the hierarchy of each heading on the page. With aria-label developers can add a heading to describe the purpose of a discrete element on the page. This helps developers create clear relationships between different elements. Developers can also draw attention to important controls by labeling them with aria-role tags, for example a drop-down menu button would be labeled with the following tag: Aria-has popup: true.

See the Pen Simple Accessible Tabs by Scott Vinkle (@svinkle) on CodePen.

In the HTML in the example above the tabs are created using an unordered list with classes on each list item. The jQuery captures the click events when a tab is clicked and adds ‘aria-selected’ : ‘true’ and ‘tab-widget__tab-content—active’ to the selected tab and hides the other tabs by adding ‘aria-selected’ : ‘false’ to the remaining tabs. On line 127 the initial attributes for the tabs are set, together these snippets help screen readers recognize which tab is visible. The JavaScript on line 35 also adds keyboard support to the tabs. The rest of the file handles capturing click and keyboard events so that jQuery can add ‘role’ and ‘presentation’ attributes to the currently selected tab.

Aria tags can help screen readers to interpret custom controls as radio buttons when the custom control is labeled with: Aria-role=radio button. When an application has a sandbox area that communicates feedback or updates to the user it can be labeled with a live region tag: Aria-live. This ensures that when the text on this element changes it will automatically be spoken to the user through the screen reader.

Page refreshes are a key part of the web for screen readers because when a page refresh occurs it signals to the screen reader that it should announce the new page to the user and re-read the contents of the page to the user. This means that single page web applications pose special challenges to accessibility. In a single page app there no full page refreshes so the screen reader and therefore the user will not be alerted to the updated content. The result will be that the user receives no feedback on their actions. The best solution is to emulate native page refresh behavior. On view loaded, update the page title and announce it to the user.

The full specifications for WAI-ARIA are maintained by the W3 like the specifications for HTML itself under the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) but sometimes guidelines can be more helpful than specifications so here are a few general guidelines for designers:

• make sure that there is visual contrast between text and its background.
• don’t use color alone to convey information;
• provide your website with clear and consistent navigation;
• ensure that form elements clearly include associated labels;
• make sure that feedback elements like error messages can easily be identified;
• use headings and spacing to group related content;
• provide alternate text for images;
• consider designing your website so that all functionality is accessible through the keyboard.

There are several simple decisions you can make when developing a website that will make the website more accessible without getting too deep in special accessibility markup or screen reader testing. By making sure that your HTML conveys meaning through its structure you will help screen readers process information in the same way it appears on the page for sighted users. This is important for users who use a magnifier in conjunction with a screen reader.

Using appropriate HTML mark-up for headings, lists, tables, and other elements allows the screen reader to categorize the structure of the page for the user in a familiar way. For more involved layouts HTML5 provides additional elements, such as <nav> and <aside> to make content easier for screen reader users to understand. Even writers and content strategists can have a positive impact on accessibility. By providing unique page titles for each page, and by using headings to convey the meaning and structure of each web page. Make sure that the link text you write is meaningful outside of the visual context of the page (avoid writing calls to action like “click here”). Write transcripts and captions for multimedia content.

We have gone very far down this rabbit hole together because the potential beneficiaries of all this work are a wider group than you might think. If you’ve ever tried to use a mobile app with one hand because your other hand is carrying something, if you have ever tried to use a mouse with your non-dominate hand because of an injury you’ve been situationally disabled. And isn’t it wonderful when your fingers are sticky and you can still navigate a website using a keyboard with your knuckles? All of us unfortunately are susceptible to the disabilities that come from getting older like memory loss, hard-of-hearing, deteriorating vision and limited movement. 

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. — Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

 

Featured image, accessibility image via Shutterstock.

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Popular design news of the week: December 21, 2015 – December 27, 2015

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Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

Design Trend: How to Create a Cool Split Screen Aesthetic

 

The 4 Top Colour Trends for 2016

 

Design for Startup

 

Ultimate Guide to Font Pairing

 

Google Blocky – The Web-based Visual Programming Editor

 

FontPro – Typography Project Made Simple

 

I’m not a Talented Designer

 

The Very Best of Material Design in 2015

 

The Galaxy of ‘Star Wars’ Fonts

 

Being Responsive to the Small Things

 

Grid, Flexbox, Box Alignment: Our New System for Layout

 

The 10 Chrome Extensions You Need Most

 

Juntoo – Add Notes to any Element on any Web Page

 

How Advertising Taught Me Good Design

 

Brands that Won (and Lost) Google in 2015

 

Ad Blocking Phase II

 

National Geographic Release its Pictures of 2015

 

The New York Times: The Year in Visual Stories and Graphics

 

Google Trends – Exlore the Biggest Moments of 2015

 

Miss Universe: A Case Study on Banner Blindness in Print Design

 

The 15 Most Beautifully Designed Apps of 2015

 

Responsive Images Now Landed in WordPress Core

 

The State of the Modern Political Logo

 

I Analyzed 250 SaaS Pricing Pages – Here’s What I Found

 

Complete Beginner’s Guide to Information Architecture

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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Comics of the week #319

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Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Medically speaking

It’s a one to one ratio

 

Where’s the concession stand?

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

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Designing the holidays

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It’s that time of year again. You know, the time when we all write articles about “that time of year”? I thought it would be fun to research how design (and the advertising industry) have affected not only Christmas, but a few of the major international holidays.

It’s hard to know exactly how much advertising has affected history. I mean, consider the story of how Coca Cola made Santa fat and red. It’s not true… at all.

According to the Snopes article that I just linked:

at best what Coca-Cola popularized was an image they borrowed, not one they created.

All in all, that story says more about how the advertising and design industries sell themselves than how they’ve changed holidays. The truth is that it’s usually the ads themselves that change with current practices, values, and trends.

But still, advertising has had some impact. Let’s find out just how big that impact was.

Christmas

There are a hundred Christmas legends, and even more theories about how we came to have the holiday we have now. Mind you, I say “the holiday we have now” somewhat loosely, because Christmas is celebrated differently all over the world.

One of the best Christmases I ever had was when I was alone, and I made steaks for myself and my dog, then watched a ton of Stargate SG1. My point is that while there are some common cultural markers, Christmas itself can be very different for all of the people who celebrate it.

Now those cultural markers… that’s where the advertising comes in. While Coca-Cola may not have invented the Santa we know today, it definitely spread Santa a lot further than he would have gone on his own.

Mind you, that second one is not specifically a Coca-Cola ad, but it serves to show the extent of their marketing prowess.

But they were just working with existing elements. Santa was red already because Christmas itself was red (and green) by long-standing tradition. (Thank you random plants and the Catholic church). Long before Coca-Cola practically patented the color, other brands were using red for emphasis on Christmas as early as 1900:

And now?

Now, Christmas is a much bigger deal than being a religious festival, because it’s a huge marketing opportunity. I mean, yes, Santa is known in Japan, but other parts of Asia are getting in on it too.

I won’t go on about how brands made Christmas more of a consumer holiday than a religious festival. The truth is, we did that ourselves. Coca-Cola just adapted existing imagery to their brand, and cashed in big, while reaching into new markets.

Heck, they’re even trying to give Chinese New Year the Santa Claus treatment with some new mascots.

Valentine’s

Okay, I’ll give Hallmark the credit for this one. Them and Hershey’s, basically. I mean sure, it was a thing before all of that. People exchanged notes, handmade cards, small gifts, and the like.

However, it was having a reliable mail system that really made the whole thing take off. Shy types could buy ready-made cards, drop then in the mail for a cent or two, and declare their love from afar. Lovers separated by distance could celebrate together… sort of.

Esther A. Howland began selling the first mass-produced Valentine’s cards somewhere in the 1840s. Hallmark was founded in 1910. Now there’s a thing called the “Hallmark channel”, and it’s every bit as sappy as you might imagine. It’s as if Lifetime and the C.W. had a family-friendly baby.

In between the greeting cards and the TV channel are thousands of examples of aggressive marketing along the lines of: “Buy her stuff (especially chocolate) or she won’t love you.”

This is one holiday where I have to say that marketing and design did make a huge difference, and not necessarily for the better. Congratulations Whitman’s Chocolates (and others), you turned Valentine’s day into our cautionary tale.

Halloween

Halloween is only an “international holiday” in a very general sense. It was only recently that trick-or-treating became a common thing here in Mexico. In some places in Europe, no one does it at all.

The interesting thing about Halloween — or “All Hallows’ Eve” (as in the day before All Saints’ Day) — is that it’s an Irish holiday, that was virtually forgotten in Europe, took off in America, and was then exported back to (amongst other places) Ireland.

But even when it got started in America, it was more of a harvest festival. Pumpkins were just big squash-things. Sweets were something you made for your guests when they came over to party.

And those sweets were home-made, mostly. There was, it is amusing to note, a general distrust of candy packaged and sold by companies. The home-made treats had to be more healthy, right? Why would a company know better than someone who baked their treats fresh?

By the 1950s, however, packaged candy become more acceptable, and the candy companies advertised it more. The 1970s brought urban legends of evil homeowners randomly poisoning children, or putting razor blades in the brownies. By then, anything that wasn’t packaged was seen as unsafe.

Then all candy companies needed to do was stick cute ghosts and bats on their packaging, and it was basically a goldmine.

Conclusion

Market forces follow the opportunities, and sometimes make them, if they have to. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but we should not be proud of what happened to Valentine’s day.

We designers may not be as powerful as we’d like to imagine; however, we do need to pay attention to the work we do. Stay tuned for my inevitable future article: “Do we need a Hippocratic oath for designers?”

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Indispensable tools for low-budget startups

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Starting a web design studio can be an expensive undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be impossible! In this article, I will take you through some of the software and hardware options available that will help keep your costs down during this critical phase of your business venture. An old saying goes that a poor workman blames his tools. Indeed, it is true that if you can’t create awesome designs using free or low-cost tools, then you’re probably not really a designer. You are relying on the tool itself to do the work for you. If, on the other hand, you are truly worthy of the title “Designer”, then you should be able to create great designs using anything at hand. Which obviously begs the question: Why pay more?

Operating system: Mint Linux (Mate Edition)

Alternative to: Windows, Mac Cost: $0 This really does not require a lot of thought. The best strategy for any good designer, regardless of budget, is to build in Linux and test on Windows. Then test on your friend’s Mac. By building your sites in Linux, you gain some advantages:

• Stability
• Security
• No upgrade cost
• Access to thousands of free software titles

Of course there is also a downside:

• Limited (but improving) hardware support
• There are not many mainstream entertainment titles

Well, that last one should not be too much of a worry for a business machine. Hardware compatibility is a bit more of a concern, but you can deal with this in four ways:

1. Check for Linux compatibility before purchase
2. Run Windows in a VM, and it’s possible your hardware will work
3. Boot into Windows if you only need to use the hardware occasionally
4. Buy HP products, because HP products are natively supported

You could choose any version of Linux; but if you are coming from a Windows background, Mint will make the transition smoother. Mate is a simpler desktop user interface that does not have the annoyances present in the default edition. Using this OS, you will save money and time. You will be more productive and spend more of your time on income producing activities and less of your time babysitting the OS.

Vector drawing software: Inkscape

Alternative to: Adobe Illustrator, Sketch Cost: $0 Illustrator has a few advanced features that are still missing from Inkscape; but for most people those extra features are not used often enough to justify forking out extra cash for them. Besides, it is also true that Inkscape has a few features that you won’t find in Illustrator or Sketch. The argument that you can’t make professional illustrations with Inkscape can be squashed immediately with this showcase of images created by Sven Ebert (aka “Dillerkind”). Personally I found that working with text in Inkscape on Linux was much easier than trying to do the same thing in Illustrator on Mac. But maybe that was just me…

Photo editing software: GIMP

Alternative to: Photoshop, Affinity Photo Cost: $0 The biggest argument against GIMP is that it does not support CMYK color spaces. If you’re a web designer, that is not relevant to you, and furthermore GIMP is natively tuned to work in RGB color space. You could always use both anyway, since Photoshop can be made to work in Linux. One of the things that I really like about using GIMP in Linux is that I can assign the various dialog boxes to reside in a different workspace to the editor window. This means I can let the whole image fill my screen, and just switch to the other workspace when I want to select a different tool or layer. Many filters designed for Photoshop will work in GIMP; and some of GIMP’s built-in filters actually work better than their Photoshop equivalents. This is not to say GIMP is a substitute for Photoshop, but then again it isn’t trying to be. GIMP does what it does very well, and if you are good at image editing, you should be able to produce amazing results with GIMP; but perhaps with some extra effort compared to using Photoshop.

Color matching software: Agave

Alternative to: Adobe Kuler Cost: $0 Agave is a simple tool that helps you quickly create color schemes based on criteria you select. It works like a color wheel, only faster.

2D animation software: Synfig Studio

Alternative to: Flash, Unity Cost: $0 Synfig Studio is one of those rare gems where an open source product has significantly fewer features than its main commercial rival, but still tends to receive better consumer satisfaction reports (at least according to data sourced from a direct comparison by Software Insider). Synfig Studio can’t yet directly import SWF files, and it doesn’t support ActionScript, so unfortunately you are not going to develop the next Candy Crush game with Synfig Studio as a standalone product. Even so, Flash is no longer the sole option for online games, and doesn’t have the same feature set as Unity. Developers are increasingly attracted to the potential offered by HTML5, SVG, and JavaScript to create manageable online games that don’t require a plugin to work. Synfig studio allows you to create extremely high quality animations which can be used in any context, even for movies and television. You don’t have to take my word for it though, check out some sample videos of animations that were made with Synfig.

Accounting software: GNU Cash

Alternative to: QuickBooks, Microsoft Money, etc. Cost: $0 Any serious design business needs to have good accounting software. I have used many different products in this category and none of them have been as good as GNU Cash. It is extremely easy to set up and use, but has powerful features that are sometimes lacking in commercial software. It’s a really high quality piece of software with an unbeatable price tag!

Office software & PDF editor: LibreOffice

Alternative to: Microsoft Office Cost: $0 For all the miscellaneous documents you need to write for your business, LibreOffice fills that need; and goes even further by providing built-in PDF creation. Team it up with Master PDF Editor and PDF Shuffler, and you can create pretty much any kind of business document you need. LibreOffice can read and write documents formatted for Microsoft Office.

Conclusion

These solutions won’t suit every business, but if you are just starting out and need to carefully manage your expenses, saving money wherever possible, then you really can’t go wrong with the items on this list. Remember, a dollar saved is a dollar earned!

 

Featured image, web design tools image via Shutterstock.

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