How and Where to Get Graphic Design Products

Graphic design products are traditionally rated amongst the most expensive products. The high cost of the graphic products is attributed to the fact that most of them tend to be products that have to be produced by individual creative effort, that is, by skilled artists working personally on them. In other words, most graphic design products are not things that can be mass produced in some sweatshop somewhere, and then shipped and peddled cheaply. To get any graphic product, you normally (at least in the traditional way of doing things) have to personally visit a graphic designer, explain exactly what you want to them – and then get them to try and get it done. For their effort, most graphic designers normally charge either by the hour or per project – but in any case, their services don’t come cheap.

Are you are aware, though, that there is a way through which you can get most graphic design products for free?

Well, the key to getting most of these graphic design products for free is optimizing on the available technology, and exploiting it to the hilt.

Thinking of it, you realize that the available software tools (like Illustrator and Photoshop) have brought it within your power to easily do for yourself very many of the tasks you would traditionally have had to pay a graphic artist to do you on your behalf. But even if you still don’t have the ability to use tools like these (some people still find them hard to use), you will tend to find a lot of software available on the Internet for producing specific products: free business card software, free brochure making software, free calendar making it, and it is probably available over the Internet.

In most cases, this software gives you the power to do what you would have had to pay a graphic artist to do for you. And like most modern software, it is intuitive to use – so that all you really have to do to benefit from it is to download it onto your computer, quickly learn your way around it (most comes with brief tutorials), and get moving on with it.

Someone might ask whether trying to make graphic design products for yourself won’t lead to quality compromises. For the most part, the answer is no – because most of this free graphic design software takes the ‘artistry’ out of the making of most of these products, reducing otherwise highly artistic tasks into what are essentially data entry tasks. To specify the line thickness you want on some product (a task that would have required quite a bit of artistic dexterity if you were to do it with a brush), all you would have to do is to enter a figure on the software and bang! You have the line thickness you want.

Granted, you may not have the hardware required, for instance specialized printers, to finally get the graphic design products you want on paper (for those that must come out in print). But in as much as technology gives you the power to do the ‘design bit’ yourself, you are likely to find the cost of printing alone quite low, actually negligible in some cases.