We've spoken to leading designers from around the world, and asked
them to reveal the free and paid best iPad apps for design, creativity,
inspiration and organisation.
In this first instalment, covering the 40 best iPad apps for
designers, we've spoken to Nicholas Patten, Dan Mall, Jeffrey Zeldman,
Elliot Jay Stocks, Si Jobling, Ben Winter, Claudio Guglieri, D. Keith
Robinson, Brian Hoff, Anna Anna Dahlstrm, John A. Jacobs, Shane Mielke,
Anthony Woods, and Ajaz Ahmed, to find the iPad apps that they simply
couldn't live without.
Bigger screen, bigger apps
Unlike the iPhone, Apple's tablet has enough screen space to enable
more complex interactions. It's therefore no surprise many within the
design industry are using iPads for research, organisational tasks,
finding inspiration and even creating work. In this feature, designers
give us their take on the best iPad apps for designers.
If we've missed your favourite in our list of the best iPad apps, let us know in the comments.
Nicholas Patten
Based in New York City, Patten is a video editor, graphic and web designer, and product manager of DirectMarkets. You can follow Patten on Twitter here, and you can also check out his very own iPad app, Spatik, which enables you to combine sharing services in one app (he cheekily worked it into his list, so read more below).
Given how hugely complicated Photoshop for desktop is these days, a part of us wishes Adobe Photoshop Touch wasn't just for iPad
It may not be Photoshop CS6,
and Adobe Photoshop Touch isn't without its limitations--there's no RAW
import, and the maximum image export size is 1600-by-1600; however, it
retains enough of its desktop cousin's features (and places them in a
sleek, pared-down, tablet-optimised interface) to make it an essential
purchase, and one of the best iPad apps for designers. Patten says he
particularly likes "how it allows the user to still use layers and
control opacity levels and blend modes". And the fact that it costs less
than a pub lunch doesn't hurt either.
Adobe Ideas: providing all of the colours (but, sadly, none of the skills) to enable you to draw pretty flowers
Suitably named, the thinking behind Adobe Ideas is to get visual
brainwaves down rapidly. The app provides a simple but effective toolset
for outlines, thumbnails and rough drawings, and you can draw over the
top of images (photos, screen grabs) should you wish to. Usefully,
exports are vector-based and so can scale indefinitely. "It's a great
app for fast sketching of any ideas and designs," he enthuses.
TouchDraw is the perfect app for crafting vector hillsides.
It's also not bad for logos and floor plans, if hillsides aren't your
thing
Although seemingly in a similar space to Adobe Ideas, TouchDraw is a
more full-featured vector-drawing app. While it's suited to
illustration, it also enables you to create libraries of reusable shapes
or use bundled examples; TouchDraw is therefore suitable for working up
flow charts, graphs, diagrams and floor plans along with logos and
other imagery. However, Patten believes it's the interface that makes it
one of the best iPad apps: "I like how the toolset doesn't take up much
space, giving you more room to edit the image."
Palettes Pro might have an interface that breaks your eyes, but it's great for rapidly creating colour schemes
Although the previous three products showcase how the iPad can enable
you to create artwork, some apps turn your device into a focussed
environment for critical ancillary tasks. For example, Palettes Pro
provides the means for creating myriad colour schemes, either from
scratch, through the use of colour models, or by grabbing colours from
photographs and websites. "I really like the way it enables easy colour
capture, and how it gives you the ability to build themes for anything
you like," says Patten.
Spatik: for those times when you want to automate sharing, like you're living in the future with a robot butler
Patten's snuck one of his own creations into our list of the best
iPad apps--he's the co-creator and CEO of Spatik. However, the
recommendation itself is sound, with the app enabling you to combine
services that help you share into a single app. "Spatik has all of my
RSS feeds to design articles, inspirational sites and tutorials, and I
use it to organise my daily tweets," he says, explaining the the app was
designed to "make it easier to set-up daily tweets in a timely
fashion".
Dan Mall
Award-winning designer Dan Mall has in the past worked for Happy Cog
and Big Spaceship and is currently founder and design director at SuperFriendly. Dan is also a technical editor at A List Apart, and - via his love/obsession for typography - he is also the co-founder of Typedia and swfIR.
Beautiful typography? Check. New iPad? Check. An absurd amount of time wasted with FontBook? Definitely
'Comprehensive' is perhaps the best word to describe FontBook, which
documents over 100 type foundries, representing 1650 type designers,
constituting 35,000 fonts. Over-the-air updates ensure the data is
always up to date, but Mall is most impressed by the manner in which the
app enables you to explore typefaces: "There are resources online for
browsing type categorically, but this app lets me browse non-linearly,
which makes for a completely organic discovery experience."
Biophilia fuses art, interactivity and music, and probably makes traditionalists running record labels cower in fear
The iPad has made some of those working in traditional media rethink
how creative output should be presented--books, movies and music are all
being reconsidered by people in the field that have an experimental
bent. Bjrk's app marries music with art, in what Mall calls "an
excellent example of making music an interactive experience". He adds:
"It's a different way of thinking about what a visual and auditory
touchscreen experience can be."
Shadow: making web designers who create and test mobile websites weep with joy since early 2012
Mobile is increasingly important in the web design space, but testing
websites on mobile devices can be a tedious experience. Shadow enables
you to pair devices with a computer, and browse in sync, along with
editing pages using remote inspection. "Adobe Shadow makes development
across multiple devices much easier," explains Mall. "The ability for
every device to update changes in sync is absolutely priceless and saves
hours of debug time."
Claudio Guglieri
Guglieri is a senior designer at Fi (Fantasy Interactive)
in New York City, and is also a 'free time' Flash developer. Claudio's
work can be found on the Fi website, and you can also find a selection
of his latest projects on his Dribbble page. If you'd like to keep up with what Claudio's doing day to day, then you should also check out his Twitter page.
LiveView shows your Mac's screen on an iPad, so you can prototype interfaces (or, in this case, actually start making one).
Many modern designers are immersed in designing for mobile, but
smartphones and tablets boast wildly different resolutions to desktop
monitors, and so it can be tough to visualise how work will look on
device screens. LiveView is one of the best iPad apps for quick 'n'
dirty simulation, which mirrors your computer screen on a connected
iPad. "It's the one iPad app I can't live without," claims Guglieri.
"After trying dropping files on Dropbox, emailing screenshots and using
Image Capture, this is by far the best app I've used to see what I
design, at the correct scale, on an iPad."
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