Good news for designers and graphics lovers. If you haven’t come across it before, Aviary, a suite of creative design tools which are browser-based is now completely free to use. And it is an impressive set of tools, too. The applications (with creative bird names) in the suite include:
- Phoenix, the Image Editor – This is an accomplished and easy-to-use image editor with many of the features you’ve come to expect from commercial software such as layers, masks and effects.
- Raven, the Vector Editor – Again this is a stylish and powerful tool for creating vector drawings. It’s simpler than Illustrator and allows you to save files as SVG, EPS and bitmap formats.
- Peacock, the Effects Editor – Aviary are calling this the visual laboratory as it allows you to play around with pixel-based images. Starting with your original image you can drag and drop all kinds of effects on top.
- Falcon, the Image Markup tool – This lets you grab images and web pages, mark them up, resize and crop them. There is also an associated Firefox extension called Talon (love these names!).
- Toucan, the Swatch Editor – This is a very nice color picker and palette creator. It even has a color deficiency preview to help you improve accessibility on your site.
- Myna, the Audio Editor – This tool allows you to remix music tracks and audio clips and apply sound effects to your own voice or instruments.
All of the applications are Flash-based. I’ve used both “Phoenix” and “Raven” in the past and found them to be excellent quality. The others I haven’t really looked at in any real depth but basing it on what I’ve seen and my brief usage so far, they are very good. You can read more about all of the applications and their free use on the Aviary blog.
Have you used any of the Aviary graphics suite before?
Jennifer FarleyJennifer Farley is a designer, illustrator and design instructor based in Ireland. She writes about design and illustration on her blog at Laughing Lion Design.
