Anybody have a basic design program recommendation? Something I can easily learn and it provides some pretty good design capabilities. Maybe something that will help me learn a lot about design along the way.

I'm newbish to design but am posting random pictures/etc. to my website and I need something better then paint.

Thanks

Are you talking about image manipulation?

Gimp - http://www.gimp.org/
or photoshop are your friend

Edit:.... and http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_home.php is an excellent design resource

Not necessarily manipulation. But just creating simple graphic images. Along the same lines as an image like this http://our.windowfarms.org/files/201...Line-Setup.jpg

Well, thats more along the lines of vector graphics, in which case, http://inkscape.org/ is your friend.

You can also make fairly good diagrams in MS powerpoint... i know it seems like an odd choice, but many a poster was designed in powerpoint when I was at uni.

Google Drawings isn't bad either, along the same vein as PowerPoint.

http://www.pencil-animation.org/ is pretty good for quick scatches and stuff (mockups etc) but probably not what you have in mind.
Obviously Gimp as well

Yeah I did a lot of drawing simple stuff in the OpenOffice/LibreOffice counterpart as well.

If you're willing to pay, Adobe Fireworks is pretty powerful, and usable for a noob. It does vector and bitmap graphics, and has a lot of the same tools of Photoshop, but dumbed down

paint.net is the best one i have found. its like a free open source copy of an older version of photoshop.

+1, I use Fireworks all the time for just general website design stuff. I'm not an artist and it does absolutely everything I want it to do and I'm sure it can do more as well.

Just did some superdumb/quick Pencil Project mockup (I'm using the XULRunner standalone desktop version but browser plugin should work nicely as well)

For basic UI mockups this is pretty neat, I only use the SketchyGUI collection if it had a couple more elements (for example a browser window canvas would be nice) it would probably be all I need.

Here's some dumb login screen I did in about 3 minutes:


Balsamiq seems to be pretty cool for this stuff (provides tons more elements etc)...costs 79$ probably the next tool I'll buy unless I can get by with Pencil:

Balsamiq is awesome for UI mockups. I don't know too much about design, but I think Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard for graphics if you want a top of the line tool.

Adobe Fireworks has done pretty well for me so far with their 30 day trial. Now I need to find a way to buy it!

this guy's 9 video series has helped a lot.

The frustrating thing with buying Fireworks is that it costs significantly more if you're in the UK. $300 if your in USA, we paid £287. Lol.

On a related note I just did a google search and found out that there's a pretty good crowd-design site here in Germany (pretty sure it exists elsewhere, too). Cost is like 230 Euro on average for a company logo for example..the sweet thing is you can set the bounty for it however high you want and usually get ~100 designs in that pricerange. I checked some of the examples and the designs are really good.

So uhhh before spending 300$ on some design tool I'd just outsource my entire design stuff (you can still do good mockups for UI relatively cheap and with little design skills). Pretty sure for 1k you could get pretty solid design for company website+product which is all a web-startup needs.

Edit..they got an english page as well (I'm obviously not affiliated with them, I just think it's pretty neat for a design fool like myself)
http://www.designonclick.com/

As far as I know, 99Designs is the leading crowd-design site... It's also good for some inspiration if that's all you're after.