It’s easy to forget the roles that newspapers, books and magazines played in the formation of our digital media. Though physical media is on the decline, it is still far from dead and retains much of its charm. The biggest change that has taken place in the digital age of design is the accessibility of the tools. No longer is it locked away behind the gates of an industry, it’s freely available for anyone who has the inclination or the need. You are at complete liberty to use the resources we’ve mentioned before with the software below to design your own publication.
Word Processing
You won’t find a shortage of free word processing software, sure there are some that require you to get a whole suite of programs for just word processing. Apache Open Office and WPS Office 2016 free are examples of this. For those who simply want word processing something more stripped down to really concentrate on writing, Writemonkey and Jarte might be perfect for you. For a writing experience on your browser, you can also use Google Docs and Grammarly‘s free Chrome extension to handle most grammar and spell-check issues.
Email Client
Your regular email address is going to be filled with a lot more junk than you realise. Gmail recognised this happening and that’s why you have 3 tabs to separate the emails you actively browse from social media notifications and promotions. Keeping a separate email client is also useful because it gives you an interface that can solely be for publishing purposes. You may have heard of Mozilla Firefox for browsing the web but the people behind the browser also made Mozilla Thunderbird for email which is both free and powerful.
Image Editing
Whether you’re making a magazine article with camera pictures or a book jacket with illustrations, you need an image editing program that can give you what you need to create or make changes to your image. Enter GIMP 2, a free program to rival the design capabilities of Photoshop. Either create images or edit existing images and find plugins that enable extra features. Though there is a learning curve, there are plenty of tutorials to make you competent.
Layout Editing
After scouring the internet for the most widely recommended layout editor, we found nothing that comes close to Scribus. It’s PDF publishing abilities and CMYK saving options mean that you can have a piece published on the web and adapt it to be appropriate for printing. Quick piece of advice, if designing and editing a book, keep the text in individual chapters separate, it will help keep you organised.
And that’s our list. If you make something or have made something using these tools, leave us a comment to let us know what you thought or leave a tip for a new user.
