Free Vector Graphics Software For Mac

The Premier Vinyl Cutting Software. The easiest way to design and cut signs, logos, lettering, graphics, shapes, decals and stickers. Take your sign making to a whole new level with Easy Cut Studio. The #1 vinyl cutting software for Windows and macOS. Ranking number two on the list is Vectr Free Vector Software. This free vector graphics software is for the people who love to collaborate in work. Vectr provides a rich and diverse toolset for any graphic designer. It can also run on your browser just like the number one on our list. Note: Mac users may need to download XQuartz in order to run Inkscape. So if you're not a fan of additional downloads, this might be a hassle. Verdict: Inkscape is the best open-source vector graphics software for Mac, and the closest you'll come to Adobe Illustrator if your budget is zero. Download: Inkscape (Free) 2. Find the best Free Vector Graphics Software. Compare product reviews and features to build your list. See all Vector Graphics Software. All Products; Sort & Filter. Installed - Mac. Web-Based, Cloud, SaaS. Filter Results (12) Recommended Filters. Pricing Options.

About the author:This guest article was written by Emma Best from Laptopical - a guide to the latest laptop reviews and laptop related news. You can also follow her on Twitter.

I've been using my MacBook Pro since a while now and I must say: I really love it. The most common app(s) that designers use has to be Adobe Photoshop (Or the full suite). The app(s) are great, but there is a downside: The price tag. Photoshop CS4 costs $699, CS4 extended is $999 and the full Creative Suite starts at an stunning $1799. For many people this is just a little bit too much to 'play around with'.

Luckily, there are also many free applications out there that can do the same kind of job that Photoshop could do for you. This article rounds up the best 15 free Mac Programs for Graphic Designers. Some of these applications can even do stuff that can't be achieved using Photoshop, or are much more simple to use.

Keep your wallet in your pocket, since all these programs will cost you nothing.

GIMP

The most popular of all free photo editing software, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and is highly-supported and frequently updated. Comparative to Photoshop, users can perform basic tasks such as photo retouching, color correction, and image size, or more complicated tasks like image composition and creation. GIMP has a scripting interface for advance users, as well as plugins, extensions, and filters.

Seashore

If you want GIMP, but don't have X11, then Seashore is the appropriate software for you. Based on GIMP, it has nearly all the settings and functions of the more advanced program without the higher requirements.

Inkspace

An excellent alternative to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw, Inkscape is a free vector graphics program supporting standard SVG format, as well as XML and CSS standards. This program can do everything you'll need in a vector graphics program - tracing, path operations, direct XML editing, etc. Import and export formats include all the common image types, including JPEG, PNG, and TIFF.

Front End Digital Media Workshop

Don't waste time manually resizing individual photos for your various projects. Front End Digital Media is a batch conversion app for images (as well as video and audio), and allows you to mass resize, resample, split, join, and up/down sample JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, PSD, and PICT image files.

Image Tricks

The biggest appeal for the Image Tricks app is the ability to apply dozens of different filters to over 20 different image formats. The finished photos can then be exported as either TIFF, JPEG, or PNG.

Comipro Plus

If you create cartoons of any type, Comipro Plus is an excellent app. Designed in Japanese but usable to English speakers, this program helps create modern-looking comics, including editing and adding word bubbles.

Google SketchUp

Different from a normal vector graphics program, Google's SketchUp allows you to not only create a design, but view it in 3D. It is easier to use than more complicated 3D software, such as AutoCAD, and is free.

Colorate

Colorate is used to change and manipulate the colors in a photo. The Library generates a color swatch based on the photo, then allow you to add a new color pallete, either blending the current one, creating a custom one, or randomizing a completely new pallete.

Goldberg

This program is best used for those times when you're viewing your photos, and notice that a color is slightly off, or a side needs cropped a bit more. Instead of firing up a full photo editing application, you can simply make minor adjustments, including color correction, blurs, noise, and embossing.

NIH Image

If you need to animate one of your photos or designs, this program is for you. It's compatible with a wide array of programs, and in addition to animating images, it can also perform minor tweaks to contrast, sharpening, smoothing, filters, and more. It also analyzes particles, angles, and paths.

Scratch

This program is so simple, it can be used also immediately with no prior instruction. It is used for creating small games, interactive art, and animated stories, and is primarily marketed to children. Despite it's juvenile market, it is an excellent tool for putting together quick interactive banners and images without the learning curve.

DAZ Studio

If you're in need of realistic 3D models, DAZ Studio is an easy-to-learn 3D program for creating 3D objects, including people, animals, and objects (buildings, cars, etc). DAZ Studio is easier to use than other 3D animation tools, and is perfect for creating surrealistic and 3D art.

Bryce

Built to run with the aforementioned DAZ Studio software, Bryce is used to create real-looking landscapes using photos of real landscapes. Take a picture of your yard, a forest, some mountains, or other landscapes, import it into Bryce, and then add all the elements needed to turn it into a new world.

ArchiCAD

If you need a 3D design tool with more power and features than Google SketchUp, ArchiCAD is the right program to you. Similar to AutoCAD in both function and name, this program allows users to design their sketches and ideas into a realistic 3D render.

JAlbum

Every graphic designer requires an efficient way to keep all their photos and images organized. JAlbum is the ultimate photo organizer, as it not only allows you to organize your photos and folders using simple drag-and-drop functionality, but it also creates thumbnails and HTML pages of your photos for easy online publishing. The HTML pages to publish can be made to either export a gallery or a slide show. In addition, there's support for IPTC and EXIF data, lossless editing, image filters, style sheets, and an integrated FTP client.

Bonus: Pixelmator

I've added Pixelmator myself to this list, as Emma didn't include this app to her top 15 list. I really love to use Pixelmator myself and I don't think it should be missing from this amazing list.

Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images.

Bonus: Blender

Just like Pixelmator, I've added Blender myself to this list, as Emma didn't include this app to her top 15 list. Blender is a great open source app for 3d content.

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Are there more Mac Apps that you, as a graphic designer, love to use that is missing from the list above? Please share!

This guest article was provided to you by Emma Best from Laptopical.

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This is a list of free and open source vector graphics editor software packages.

- Inkscape

Inkscape is professional quality vector graphics software which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. It is used by design professionals and hobbyists worldwide, for creating a wide variety of graphics such as illustrations, icons, logos, diagrams, maps and web graphics. Inkscape uses the W3C open standard SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) as its native format, and is free and open-source software.

Inkscape has sophisticated drawing tools with capabilities comparable to Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW and Xara Xtreme. It can import and export various file formats, including SVG, AI, EPS, PDF, PS and PNG. It has a comprehensive feature set, a simple interface, multi-lingual support and is designed to be extensible; users can customize Inkscape's functionality with add-ons.

The Inkscape project has a growing international user community, and many learning materials exist to help get you started with your creations. Help and support is provided by the community, and there are lots of ways for you to get involved if you want to help improve the Inkscape project.

Features of Inkscape:

• Object creation
• Object manipulation
• Fill and stroke
• Operations on paths
• Text support
• Rendering
• Export/Import

- SK1 Project

sK1 is an open source cross-platform vector graphics editor like CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator, or Freehand. The major feature of sK1 is a professional precise printing and prepress ready PDF output.

sK1 2.0 is licensed under GPL v3. So you may use this application as for personal or commercial purposes without any fees.

Application supports basic vector graphics primitives: rectangles, rounded rectangles, ellipses, pies, sectors, chords, polygons, Bézier curves, text and bitmaps. The objects may be structured on pages, layers and just in selectable groups/containers. Pages within a document can be of different sizes. Bézier curves are fundamental rendering units. All the primitives can be converted into curves. We use Cairo library to render these curves on the screen.

Thanks to cairo we have cross-platform unified antialiased rendering, similar to PostScript/PDF definitions.

Free Design Software For Mac

Inside sK1 2.0 all the color values and raster images are under color management. We use LittleCMS library for these purposes. Despite of built-in profiles, end users can use own color profiles to customize color management engine. Printer emulation on screen option is also available. sK1 2.0 text engine has a full-function rendering of multi-language text and cross-platform support because it's powered by Pango library.

- Karbon

Karbon is a vector drawing application with an user interface that is easy to use, highly customizable and extensible. That makes Karbon a great application for users starting to explore the world of vector graphics as well as for artists wanting to create breathtaking vector art.

Whether you want to create clipart, logos, illustrations or photorealistic vector images – look no further, Karbon is the tool for you!

Karbon is free software and is getting better every day. To increase the pace at which we are moving forward you are invited to contribute in the form of code, documentation, tutorials, document templates or user feedback. Join us on #calligra at irc.freenode.net, or on our mailinglist.

- Libre Office Draw

Draw lets you produce anything from a quick sketch to a complex plan, and gives you the means to communicate with graphics and diagrams. With a maximum page size of 300cm by 300cm, Draw is a an excellent package for producing technical drawings, brochures, posters and many other documents. Draw lets you manipulate graphical objects, group them, crop them, use objects in 3D and much more.

Design powerful and intuitive flowcharts with Draw. Smart connectors make it easy to build flowcharts, organization charts, network diagrams and much more, even if you're not a naturally talented artist. You can define your own 'glue points' for connectors to adhere to, for precise and easily repeatable positioning. Dimension lines automatically calculate and display linear dimensions as you draw.

- Lunaci

Lunacy is a powerful vector design tool. It lets designers, who prefer Windows, access and produce Sketch-like designs without limitation or expense.

- Boxy SVG

Free Vector Graphics Software For Mac Free

Boxy SVG project goal is to create a the best tool for editing SVG files. For beginners as well as for professional web designers and web developers. On any device and operating system.

Features:

• Native SVG support. Boxy SVG editor uses SVG as a native document format. There is no need for importing and exporting your graphics each time you want to make a tiny change.
• Chromium-based rendering engine. The editor renders SVG documents exactly the same way as the most popular desktop and mobile web browsers.
• Import and export. You can import PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, PDF and AI files and export to PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP and HTML. Windows and macOS apps additionally can export to PDF format.
• Developer tools. View and edit the underlying SVG and CSS code using a built-in inspector. The inspector UI is heavly inspired by developer tools provided by web browsers.
• Keyboard shortcuts. There are over 100 commands with customizable keyboard shortcuts. You can switch quickly between different tools and panels using single-key shortcuts.
• Fonts library. Browse hundreds of free fonts provided by Google Fonts library and import them into Boxy SVG editor with a single click. You can also easily embed WOFF, WOFF2, TTF and OTF font files from disk.
• Photos library. Browse over a million free photos provided by Pixabay library. Each photo comes with a permissive license, multiple sizes and can be imported by just dragging it into the canvas.

- Ipe extensible drawing editor

Ipe is a drawing editor for creating figures in PDF format. It supports making small figures for inclusion into LaTeX-documents as well as making multi-page PDF presentations.

Ipe's main features are:

• Entry of text as LaTeX source code. This makes it easy to enter mathematical expressions, and to reuse the LaTeX-macros of the main document. In the display text is displayed as it will appear in the figure.
• Produces pure PDF, including the text. Ipe converts the LaTeX-source to PDF when the file is saved.
• It is easy to align objects with respect to each other (for instance, to place a point on the intersection of two lines, or to draw a circle through three given points) using various snapping modes.

- LaTeXDraw

LaTeXDraw is a graphical drawing editor for LaTeX. LaTeXDraw can be used to 1) generate PSTricks code; 2) directly create PDF or PS pictures. LaTeXDraw is developed in Java and thus runs on top of Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. You need Java 8 to launch LaTeXDraw.

- SVG-Edit

SVG-edit is a web-based free and open-source vector graphics editor. It can be used to create and edit Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) images from within a web browser, not requiring additional software installation.

SVG-edit is a cross-browser web-based, JavaScript-driven web tool, and has also been made into browser addons, such as an addon for Firefox, a Chrome extension, and a standalone widget for Opera. There's also an experimental SVG editing extension on MediaWiki that uses SVG-edit.

SVG-edit consists of two major components: svg-editor.js and svgcanvas.js. These components work cooperatively. File svgcanvas.js can be used outside of SVG-edit, allowing developers to create alternative interfaces to the canvas.

- TupiTube

TupiTube ( also known as Tupi 2D) is a 2D animation software focus on children, teenagers and amateurs. This project is developed and maintained by the Colombian startup MaeFloresta. This project is covered under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2, meaning that TupiTube is free and open-source software.

Features:

• Support for basic tools for vector illustration that includes rectangles, ellipses, lines, and polygons. Paths can also be created using the pen or pencil tool. The paint bucket tool can be used to fill bounded areas of vector objects.
• Raster images (sometimes called Bitmap) can be imported and used as either static backgrounds or animated assets.
• Finished animations can be exported to various file formats that include: (Ogg Theora, AVI, MPEG, SWF. Or as a sequence of images in PNG, JPEG, and SVG format.
• Basic support for tweening of positions, colors, rotation, scale, sheer, and opacity has been added to recent releases.
• The Library panel allows for the organization and reuse of imported media assets.

Free Vector Graphics Software Mac Os X

- Synfig Studio

Synfig Studio (also known as Synfig) is a free and open-source 2D vector graphics and timeline-based computer animation program created by Robert Quattlebaum with additional contributions by Adrian Bentley.

Synfig began as the custom animation platform for Voria Studios (now defunct), and in 2005 was released as free/open source software, under the GNU General Public License.

Best Graphic Software For Mac

Features:

As a true front-end and back-end application, it is possible to design the animation in the front-end, Synfig Studio, and to render it at a later time with the backend, Synfig Tool, on another (potentially faster) computer without a graphical display connected. Incremental and parallel rendering with Synfig Tool is supported by some open source render farm management software, such as RenderChan.

Free Vector Graphics Software For Mac

The goal of the developers is to create a program that is capable of producing 'feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources.' The program offers an alternative to manual tweening so that the animator does not have to draw each and every frame.

The software is capable of simulating soft-shading using curved gradients within an area so that the animator doesn't have to draw shading into every single frame. There is also a wide variety of other real-time effects that can be applied to layers or groups of layers like radial blurs, color tweaks that all are resolution-independent. Other features include the ability to control and animate the width of lines at their individual control points, and the ability to link any related data from one object to another. Synfig also works with High Dynamic Range Imaging.

- Vectr

Vectr is a free graphics software used to create vector graphics easily and intuitively. It's a simple yet powerful web and desktop cross-platform tool to bring your designs into reality.

- Knotter

Knotter is a free and open source customizable interlace designer.

Interlace patterns are a kind of design historically used as a decorations in many places and by different cultures. Some examples are Celtic knotworks and Islamic interlaces. Knotter aims to allow its user to intuitively design such patterns and to provide easy ways to integrate the result in external general-purpose graphic software for this purpose designs created within Knotter can be saved in a custom Human-Readable format and exported as scalable vector graphics and in a wide number of raster image formats.