I’m listing free design, video, photo, etc – creative tools – and other resources that can help you create without shilling hundreds of dollars to the big tech companies. What I often look for is Open Source, Free for Personal Use Tools, and though some of these tools are ‘big tech companies’, I want to emphasize that you get to choose your relationship to them. My own ethos is to use them with intention and discernment :p, and to know that there are other tools available.
This Free Creative Tools will be a part of a larger resource I’ll create with ‘Book Marks’ to tools sites that I find helpful and/or interesting. Enjoy 🙂 . If you have any suggestions – feel free to write to me. This is an on-going and changing resource.
Last updated August 4th, 2026*
With free fonts, you can also do a quick internet search – usually type ‘free fonts’, and a nice selection of sites usually pop up, but remember to read their terms of use. Some fonts are only for use for personal, other fonts are open to be used for personal and commercial. A quick double check helps. Remember there are real people who work on special fonts, so it’s good to support them.
* Each of these have free and paid features/tiers, but I list and use them, because the free version is good enough to replace paid tools, for example, the following have fully replaced my Adobe tools.
Design(graphic, web etc.)/Photo/Layout:
Video:
3D-Modeling:
Not Free BUT – you can try them out for 14 days (as of right now)
Audio Tools:
I don’t work a lot in audio, so I don’t actually know. Many of the video editing tools these days have sophisticated audio tuning for video. In regards to audio itself, the go to for many years has been: