Business and Art- Resources for the Creative Business

This list is by no means exhaustive but each program listed here I have personally used for a minimum of 3 months and believe they are all worth recommending.

Graphic Design Tools

Quite rightly Photoshop & Illustrator are industry standard programs for professional graphic designers and web designers. But not everyone needs such advanced tools (or can pay for them). If you just need to design a nice flyer for an upcoming exhibition occasionally or even your create your own wedding invitation their are some great graphic design tools that aren’t as polished as Photoshop but have everything you could possibly need.

GIMP

Funny name, awesome product. Gimp is an open-source program where you can manipulate photographs and drawings using some amazingly advanced tools. There are a huge amount of filters similar and sometimes even better than Photoshop so you can really create to your hearts content. It should be noted that it is a very different program so it may take some getting used to. Here is a link to the manual so you can read up…before you download it at http://www.gimp.org If you like the product think about donating to GIMP. You can do so in their websites sidebar- Its Free as in Freedom.

Scott Sanders has written a great review of GIMP 2.6 here.

 Inkscape

Inkscape is the Illustrator version of GIMP (different people though). In Inkscape you can create advanced drawings, create business cards, flyers, invitations and all those vital things required of a creative. I really like using Inkscape, it handles 75% of what Illustrator does but doesn’t have the huge memory requirements of some other programs.

It is well worth a test download at Cnet.com.au or http://inkscape.org

 

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Collaboration Tools

One of the biggest problems facing creatives today is often just how many people need to work together to get a project off the ground. It is vital that you are able to share, collaborate and learn with your team no matter where they are based. Here are a few suggested tools & resources that should make that project easier.

Drop Box

Drop Box is a great way to share and store information in the cloud.  It runs on the same principals as Hotmail or Gmail. You set up an account with a password and upload the files you want to share  into this account. You are then able to view and share that folder with any of your computers or anyone else you want. You simply invite someone to share your folder by typing in their email address, they click yes and away you go. DropBox is so popular these days as you can store huge files in DropBox far more than you could ever email. A basic Account is free (up to 2GB) and should be more than adequate for the solo professional. Paid upgrades are easily available for larger projects and are still quite reasonable.

Here is my recent review of the issues/ benefits of Cloud Computing.

 

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Documents, Spreadsheets, & Presentation Tools

10 years ago when writing documents and spreadsheets it was Microsoft Office Word or Excel or nothing. These days the competition has heated up.

Open Office

Open Office is a free fully fledged suite of programs where you will be able to run an art business efficiently and effectively. Their version of Word and Excel are very similar and the learning curve is non-existent between Microsoft and Open Office. The main difference you will notice immediately is the file type is different and you will need to install a plug-in to read Office programs.

The other feature that I love is Open Office’s ability to pdf your document quickly, easily and for free. In fact for whatever reason the PDFs that are created are already natively a smaller file size so you can email without resizing. Download Open Office here.

What no more 1MB pdfs?!?

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Email Program

These days most of us are so overrun by email that often it is all too overwhelming. Personally I think it is a great idea to have an email program on your computer as well as having one in the Cloud. For email on your desktop or laptop I can really only recommend two programs; Thunderbird from the Mozilla Foundation and Microsoft Outlook.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a great email client and considering it is free it is an amazing program. It has a similar interface to other email clients like Outlook but the search funtionality seems to be far superior. The Mozilla Organisation have released an add-on called Lightning which is a great calendar to keep track of appointments. The only small downside is sometimes it doesn’t import your contacts quite as easily as Outlook or Gmail but really it is a small price to pay for a great tool.

I have just written a more complete review of Thunderbird here.

Download Thunderbird

  and the Calendar Add-on way over here…… Lightning

Outlook

Outlook 2007 and 2010 are very good products as well. As the majority of the world uses Outlook it means every single add-on, plug-in, and importer generally works well with the program.

We’re always adding new reviews and resources so keep the page bookmarked or follow us on Twitter.

If you’re after free templates that will help you run a successful Art Business click here to go to the Freebie Section.

We’ve just added a great Small Business Template tailored specifically for Artists and Freelancers.

 

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