Open source is pretty much everywhere in the digital realm. Many organizations across the globe flourish by providing open source related services which, in fact, have great demand in the Middle East. The Open source CMS development sector, for example, has been around for many years, still retains great demand, and is one of the most important sectors in the open source development industry in Dubai. As a matter of fact, many websites built for people and brands in the Middle East are powered by open source technologies. 

Most of the world’s servers run on some form of Unix or Linux platforms, and utilizes a number of open source tools and utilities – from script interpreters to plugins and analytics extensions. 

Open source for web design

Despite the global presence of open source technologies and their influence on the software development Dubai industry, they still haven’t dominated the web design sector which relies more on paid software and tools like Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, Sublime Text, and the Affinity Suite etc. The most popular open source web design software that we often see a bit include either WordPress or GIMP. 

However, apart from these two, there are many lesser-known open source tools that are still active and promising. Here are 4 such great open source tools that web designers would love. 

Krita

Modern web design trends make it evident that more and more designers are using illustrations and paintings in their web designs. And Krita is their first option for a tool. 

Krita, ideally, is for those designers who wants to go for a traditional look to their graphics. It’s nevertheless a powerful, feature-rich graphics editor that focuses on illustrations and digital paintings. 

UIkit

Those designers interested in using a fun, front-end framework should give UIkit a shot. It’s a byte-conscious framework gaining a steady influx of followers. Its GitHub repo is seeing a lot of action, and it’s praised for being modular. It is considered good because it simply looks good which is what many designers want – simple and unsophisticated. 

GrapesJS

GrapesJS is a great site builder framework where designers can edit site designs online. It’s not that well-known but still deserves to be part of this list. The open source framework supports responsive design and many preview modes, and comes with an undo/redo option. Designers can also drag and drop from GrapesJS’ pre-defined set of page elements.

The framework can be used in applications like site builder service, content management systems or on anything that needs customizable HTML/CSS templates.  

Pencil

Once it was just a Mozilla Firefox extension. Now Pencil is a stable wireframing application thanks to the open source community. Though it lacks collaboration features of many of its online rivals, it’s a great option for designers who work offline. The main benefit of Pencil is that it enables designers to create prototypes pretty swiftly by using its large library of elements and stencils. 

Conclusion

Many open source software projects come and go every year. Some of those projects are backed by a loyal group of developers, while many others end up getting forgotten. These 4 tools, though relatively obscure at the moment, have proven at least to a small community of designers that they can be valuable for enterprises providing open source development services.