Thanks to an article on digg.com I found this list of top 10 freeware apps for Windows. Most of these have versions for Mac OS and Linux as well though (in case we have some of you folks on baord here).
In any case, in that list I also found a program called Inkscape. You can check it out at www.inkscape.org, and the best part is that it's both open source and free. What is it you might ask? It's a scalable vector graphics editor. Here's a little snippet from the site about Inkscape...
Quote: Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.
Inkscape's main goal is to create a powerful and convenient drawing tool fully compliant with XML, SVG, and CSS standards. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development process, and by making sure Inkcape is easy to learn, to use, and to extend.
So for those of you who don't feel like (or in my case are not able) to plunk down hundreds of dollars for Illustrator (not to say anything of using other means of acquiring the software) then you can give Inkscape a try and see if it fits the bill. Hope this will be useful to some :D.
