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What Is The Best Graphic Design App For iPhone?
Despite stiff rivalry, the iPhone remains one of the strongest smartphones for artists. Apple’s pocket-sized wonder may be a really useful interface tool. When combined with the right iPhone games, it can pack a serious punch in – and, most significantly, out of – the studio.
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So, if you want to draw on the go, need a specific tool to assist with your everyday design job, or want to take it more seriously with something to help you handle your tasks, time, and resources, there’s a great range of must-have apps right here.
Pocket Procreate
Procreate has long been the go-to art software on the iPad, but it’s still looked a bit too fiddly on the iPhone’s smaller screen to be worth the effort. The most recent update, on the other hand, is a much more satisfying experience, with a new gui and a custom QuickMenu that allows you to quickly navigate your favourite resources.
It also has some amazing new features including QuickShape, which turns your rough doodles into flat and flawless forms, as well as the text tools that wowed iPad users a few months back. There are also resources for Liquify, Warp, and Distort, as well as a sophisticated layer framework that can be used to make animated GIFs. If you’ve been putting off to Procreate on your iPhone, now is the time to do so.
Retrospecs
Retrospecs is the ideal retro choice if you want a simple and easy way to make authentic-looking pixel art. Simply feed it images and video clips from your tablet, and it will pixelate them to appear as they did on most home computers and games consoles from the 1970s to the 1990s, including the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Sega Mega Drive.
The free edition has a restricted range of presets, but with a small one-time fee, you can access all of the systems and dither modes, as well as a personalised editor, video editing, and animation modes.
Tayasui Drawings
Tayasui Sketches is a venerable iOS classic that’s seen several upgrades through the years. It’s well made for sketching on the iPhone and comes with everything you need to make stunning pictures. It’s free to download, so if you want more software, you can switch to the Pro edition for $5.99/£5.99 and receive more brushes, infinite textures, gradients, and the option to save your favourite palettes, among other things.
Autodesk SketchBook
Autodesk’s SketchBook Pro is one of the most common iPad art apps among digital artists. The smaller-screen edition is an excellent addition to every designer’s iPhone software library.
There are over 170 customisable brushes to pick from, all accessed through a basic yet intuitive UI that lets you pin toolbars to the panel for quick access. Layers, transparency solutions, metadata, and advanced blend modes are all available.
Draw with Adobe Illustrator
This software contains many of the common drawing resources and features from Adobe Ideas, as well as all of the strength that designers have come to anticipate from Adobe.
Adobe Illustrator Draw includes all an illustrator needs to submit layered and flat artwork, including the ability to draw with vectors, access high-resolution, royalty-free pictures, and sync assets to appear in your workflow whenever they are needed.
We teach adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign in our online graphic design course at Blue Sky Graphics.
Adobe Photoshop Sketch
With Adobe Photoshop Sketch, you can draw on the go with a variety of paints, pencils, pens, and markers. The iPhone software uses Photoshop’s painting engine which allows you to import brushes, allowing you all of the textures and blending effects you’d get on paper.
Filmic Pro
FiLMiC Pro is, put obviously, the solution to filmmakers’ frustrations with Apple’s default camera software. The ability to set the target and exposure separately, lock them separately, and lock the white balance are the most noticeable and automatically helpful functions. They’re all essential for nailing the sound and atmosphere of what you’re shooting, and FiLMiC understands that.
Video enthusiasts can rejoice at the freedom to select not just the resolution, but also the framerate and, most of all, the bitrate, allowing you to capture at output well above the Apple defaults – ideal if you’re recording a tonne of motion.
General Assembly
Assembly, which looks like a grown-up version of Fuzzy Felt, wins a spot on the best iPhone applications list by allowing users to effortlessly produce stunning vector imagery without needing to learn Illustrator’s tricky ways.
Rather than painstakingly designing your own vector forms, you can browse Assembly’s library of over 1,000 simple shapes, which you can then match together to create larger patterns, either over a plain backdrop or on top of a background picture.
It’s a building-block approach to design that can seem too simple, but it’s been placed together intelligently and with just enough resources to enable you to craft precise photos in minutes, and it’s ideal for making projects on the go.
PANTONE Studio
This official app from the undisputed colour kings functions as a digital swatch book, with over 10,000 colours from the Pantone Plus Series and beyond. You can use it to align colours in images, build harmonious colour palettes, and then share or sync them with your favourite design software programmes.
Paper
Paper is one of the best iPhone applications for artists, capable of capturing and linking your notes, images, and drawings – serving like a digital wall of sticky notes for your tablet.
Paper’s innovative swipe-to-style formatting allows users to easily make checklists and annotations whilst still clarifying information in images. The initial iPad app was named Apple’s App of the Year in 2012, and this iPhone edition is a fully free must-have for designers.
Adobe Comp CC
Comp CC converts your scribbled shapes and lines into crisp graphics, allowing you to build templates on your iPhone with natural drawing movements.
You can import colours, graphics, vector forms, and fonts from your Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries, as well as fonts from Adobe Typekit, and then submit your comps to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, or Muse to finish when you return to the workplace.
