Do It Yourself Cheap Catalogs with these Free Web Tools

With the myriad of free design tools for catalog printing, you can easily create your own designs from home without too much trouble. Cheap catalog printing can easily be possible with these tools. In this article, I will give you a few suggestions on the best web tools that can help you create your own color catalogs, all free.

• Open Office – this is a very powerful collection of applications comparable to Microsoft Office. Its word processor Open Office Writer and its image editing application Open Office Draw can easily be your friends in printing and design. Writer will take care of your word processing tasks, and you can develop nice layouts and configurations for your color catalogs. Draw can easily help you add precisely done images and graphics that can enhance your catalog layout. Best of all though, you can download all of them free.

• GIMP – If you need a more powerful image editing application other than Draw, you might want to try GIMP. GIMP is a very versatile application that can help you enhance your catalog product images. You can add filters, effects, shadows as well as manipulate those image pixels precisely just like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Draw. Since GIMP is open source, you can download it free. Just be a little patient with learning to use it and you should be rewarded with a powerful web tool that will not cost you a thing.

• Creative Commons search on Flickr – Now, in terms of design resources one of the best things I can recommend to you is the creative commons search feature in Flickr. By just doing a precise search for creative commons images, you will get tons of royalty free images that you can use for your color catalogs. Just give the author due credit for the images and you should be all set. There are thousands of images you can use for commercial purposes in Flickr and I have no doubt that you will be able to create nice layouts from them for your catalog printing.

• Free font databases – Fonts are also no problem for designing. The Internet has hordes of free font databases that you can raid and download fonts. Most of these are free and there are plenty of options both wacky and useful for any kind of theme. Just search for free fonts on your search engine and everything should be set.

• Free catalog templates – If you are a little bit iffy about creating a layout from scratch, you may want to download some free catalog templates from the web. Typically, printing companies do offer a free download of these kinds of templates. Of course, you may need to have the appropriate program to open it, but it most cases these templates are in image format, which you can easily customize.

• Free design advice – Finally, if you just need some advice for catalog layouts, you can easily find design tips and tricks online. There are thousands of sites out there dedicated to desktop publishing. From blogs, forums and official self-help sites, the knowledge is out there for you to discover.

Good! All those tools should help you get set for catalog printing and the great thing about them is that they are all free. Good luck!

Kaye Z. Marks is an avid writer and follower of the developments in cheap catalogs or catalog printing that help businesses in their marketing and advertising campaigns.