There is a plethora of tools and software out there to support you in expressing your creative side; this section by no means provides a comprehensive overview of all of them but does go over some of the more common options, particularly with regards to what can be obtained for free or at a significant discount for students.  As always, if something isn't readily available, it's always worth checking with your college or relevant societies because they might just already have it!

When discussing general design software, useful for editing photos, creating digital artwork, etc., it would be impossible to fail to mention Adobe Creative Cloud, or Adobe CC for short.  Adobe offers its Creative Cloud software package, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and more to students at a massively discounted rate (≈65% reduction on subscription cost).  Obtaining the discount can be achieved through UniDays, which we would recommend as an app to have on your phone as a general rule of thumb regardless.

If the monthly subscription costs are less your thing, then there are some low cost competitors, such as those on offer from Affinity: the Illustrator-like Vector, Photoshop-like Photo, and InDesign-like Publisher can be had for a low one-off fee.  Another particularly attractive package is that of Corel software, which, whilst not cheap at first glance, offers up to 96% off its products for students who meet eligibility requirements.

For anyone looking to do some product, industrial, furniture, or other design, then (in addition to pen and paper) a tool you might want to use is Computer Aided Design (CAD) software.  You'll find CAD software available in some of the departments, such as engineering or architecture, but there are some fantastic free or heavily discounted options available to students as well.  First, Autodesk offers Fusion360 to students for free on an educational license that needs to be renewed every year and Sketchup, whilst not free, does offer a heavily discounted rate for education, at circa $55 per year.  Also worth a mention is the 2D draughting software eDrawings, which can be useful for architecture and interior design planning.

Image credits

CC0 by ractapopulous via Pixabay