From capturing artful street graffiti to remembering stunning color palettes to providing feedback for developers, today’s mobile designer must be able to work on the go. With these 10 apps for your iPhone and iPad, designers can capture, share, and remember the little moments of creativity that may hit at any given moment.
1. Loose Leaf
With Loose Leaf, you can doodle, annotate, and share your ideas. Import photos, draw quick diagrams, cut and crop with scissors. The app’s scissors functionality allows you to easily crop out any photo and piece it together with another background. Loose Leaf is engineered to be a simple, no fuss, mobile dry erase board. It is perfect for simple drawings, diagrams, quick notes or annotations. iOS ($4.99)
2. Marvel
The Marvel iPhone and iPad app turns simple sketches on paper into interactive, tappable prototypes that allow you to demo your app ideas and share with others. Draw your app screens on paper, whiteboards (or napkins!) and then take photos of each screen using the app. Everything is synced with Dropbox and pushed your Marvel web account, which is automatically set-up for you at www.marvelapp.com. iOS (Free)
3. POP
POP is another app that allows designers to draw sketches on paper, take a picture of the sketch, and connect them to make interactive prototypes. The app integrates 128 bit SSL encryption, the most powerful security out there, to keep your ideas and data safe. POP offers 5 types of transitions, including fade, next, back, rise, and dismiss. iOS (Free)
4. Skitch
Skitch by Evernote helps designers visually share their thoughts with others. You can give feedback and get your ideas across faster using annotation, shapes, and sketches. You can also open a PDF and highlight changes, so you can skip the lengthy, confusing email chains and give clear feedback. iOS (Free)
5. Udemy
Udemy is the world’s largest destination for online courses, training, and tutorials. You can watch courses on the go, offline and at 2x speed. With the Udemy app, you can squeeze in a few lectures on your commute. You can also find amazing courses on design or tutorials on the newest software packages. iOS (Free)
6. Design Shots–Dribbble Client
Browse Dribbble on your iPhone. Scroll through the images posted by the best designers on Dribbble, view animated GIFs, share the images. See Dribbble shots from people you follow, like and comment on shots, and follow users. iOS (Free)
7. Adobe Color
Extract color themes from the world around you using your camera, Creative Cloud, or any existing image from your photo albums. Edit or refine color themes and experiment with different combinations using the interactive color wheel or edit your colors using RGB color sliders. Create color themes with pre-sets based on color theory–a great option if you’re getting started or looking for quick inspiration. iOS (Free)
8. Fontli
Fontli is a social network for typography enthusiasts to broadcast their passion through pictures taken from a mobile device. Users can spot a typeface by simple photo tagging. Fontli then gives additional information on the typeface, such as Designer/Foundry info and other pictures tagged with it. iOS (Free)
9. Ikonica
Ikonica lets you easily test different icon designs on springboard and in various backgrounds and sizes. Simply upload an icon image from your camera roll, or drag and drop from your Mac and get an instant preview on all your devices. iOS (Free)
10. Word Swag
Create beautifully customized text layouts that would normally take minutes–or even hours–with just a tap of your finger. Word Swag has hundreds of quotes, thoughts, and jokes so you are never at a loss for words. iOS ($3.99) Featured photo credit: Using iPhone 6 on Business Meeting/VIKTOR HANACEK via picjumbo.com
