BP4_Aviary

How have I not heard of Aviary before? This tool (or should I say suite of tools) is incredible.  It provides similar capabilities of the Adobe Creative Suite, but in a more user-friendly context, in a community sharing atmosphere, all online, and for free!  This is a resource that every designer should be able to make use of.

Aviary has a tool for almost everything revolving around images and audio:

This is great for someone like me who constantly needs to create visual content for my e-learning courses, but doesn't necessarily have the right tools loaded on their computer at work.  Now I am no longer limited to the licenses my company can afford.  I can create vector objects and put together music tracks all I want!

When you click on an editor you get an overview of the program and are shown a video tutorial or demo:

From here you can explore other users' creations or launch the editor.  Here I am playing around in the vector editor:

If you look at the little window on the left you can see Aviary lists all the keyboard commands you can use with the selected tool.  This is a feature I wish Adobe had!

The next picture shows me throwing some tracks together in the audio editor:

I had an absolute blast piecing together different intros, loops, and ends.  This really is an amazing tool, I will be on the lookout for ways to implement it into my work.

Overall this is a great tool because it is free, easily accessible, quite robust in its capabilities, and should be able to help anyone involved in visual or audio design.  The fact that it is also a community where users share with and inspire each other is icing on the cake.