In today’s business environment, smartphones and tablets represent far more than just user end-point devices. Their portability and user-friendly nature have allowed designers to be able to track ideas, sketch and stay organized from anywhere. Furthermore, App stores have also contributed to this ease.
With the availability of thousands of Apps, designers have now many options to keep their work on the go wherever they go. Below, we have collected 40 most essential apps for the designers and creatives of all sorts. So what do you think? What did we miss? Which apps do you like the most and why? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about this compilation
iPhone Apps
Trovi
Trovi is a unique new mobile app that lets you share and shout about your favourite local businesses.
Ikonica
Ikonica is an essential tool for iOS app designers, developers and owners. It let’s you easily test different icon designs on springboard and in various backgrounds and sizes.
Ruler
With a single touch your iPhone turns into a top accurate ruler.
M.dot app lets you create a mobile-optimized website for you and your business. On your own domain, in 5 minutes.
Fontli
Fontli is a social network for Typography enthusiasts to broadcast their passion through pictures taken from a mobile device. What makes Fontli different from other photo sharing applications is its typography centric features. Users can spot a typeface by simple photo tagging and Fontli gives additional information on the Typeface such as Designer/Foundry info and other pictures tagged with it.
Evernote
Evernote is an easy-to-use, free app that helps you remember everything across all of the devices you use. Stay organized, save your ideas and improve productivity.
Color Expert
Color Expert contains powerful tools to help artists and designers identify, translate, capture and showcase color.
Sketcher Free
A fun procedural drawing tool.
HEX RGB Colors Guide
A wonderful reference app suitable for anyone who deals with colors, including: web designers, bloggers, print designers and virtually anyone who uses colors to publish.
PicLab HD
PicLab HD is a powerful design studio in the palm of your hands. Create beautiful photos by adding text, artwork, light leaks, textures, grains, photo filters, adjustments, and much more to your photos – while using one of the most beautiful and simplest interfaces to date.
Serious Paint Free
A painting app focusing on natural brusheffects and smooth, pleasant workflow.
Fontest
Fontest is a developer and typography tool that helps you quickly preview how your favorite fonts are rendered on Android.
Pattrn
Pattrn is an unique wallpaper app for phones and tablets that gives you access to the huge collection of patterns created by the COLOURlovers community.
Strata
Runner up for Most Innovative Game Design on the Indie Showcase at Casual Connect USA 2013!
Iconical
Create your own icons on your Home Screen using Iconical.
Files
Files allows you to store and view files on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. Connect to Files via Wi-Fi from any Mac or PC and drag and drop files straight from the Finder or Windows Explorer, as you would with any other shared folder.
Adobe Kuler
Adobe Kuler is a fun and simple way to capture inspiring color combinations wherever you see them.
Adobe Ideas
Adobe® Ideas gives you the ability to draw freeform vector illustrations wherever you are. Replace your pen and paper with a huge virtual canvas, customizable brushes, and pressure sensitive stylus support.
Design Duet
Create and View your Photoshop Canvas Live on your iPhone over WiFi! Save to camera roll!
SketchBook Pro for iPad
Find out for yourself what has made SketchBook Pro the industry standard for digital sketching!
Geló
Your images with unlimited possibilities.
MDot App
Create a mobile website for your business or yourself from an iPhone.
Dotdotdot
dotdotdot is a social reading application for ebooks and long-format webtexts.
Blux Camera Pro
Blux Camera Pro has PEAR Technology that can verbally recommend the best scene mode for the lighting, subject, time of day, and weather. Now you don’t have to be a professional photographer to easily and effortlessly capture the perfect image every time!
Marksta
Marksta allows you to watermark your photography, adding text or a logo directly from your iPhone or iPad. Add a copyright notice to your images before sharing them to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, etc. Or add your Twitter name, or your website address. Whatever you want to write, Marksta makes it simple and fast. And now you can add and edit IPTC and caption information too.
Repix – Inspiring Photo Editor
Repix is more than a photo editor. It’s a creative tool that lets you turn ordinary photos into masterpieces.
Path on – Swipe to Type
Introduced by official App Store Facebook.
Now your pictures can have a thousand words with Path On. Use crazy fonts to decorate your pictures with words, quotes, and lyrics, and share it with your friends.
Photochop
Chop up and distort your photos. Break up your photos into tiles then nudge, scale, rotate and delete the tiles to create artistic photocollages or use the warp mode to make people’s faces look weird.
Android Apps
Asssist Dribbble Widget
Asssist Widget brings all your favourite Dribbble shots right to your home screen.Shots are updated at configurable periods from the “popular”, “everyone” and “debut” shots.
Color Pal
Easily find color palettes and schemes for any design project. Whether you’re a web designer or just looking to paint your son’s room, you’ll find some of the best color palettes/schemes available.
Floor Plan Creator
Predefined room shapes as well as free drawing of a room shape with S-Pen or touch.
Color Buddy
Simply generate color palettes to match source colors in HEX and RGB values. Color theory mode creates palettes based on traditional color theories, while shade mode generates palettes which are variations of a single hue. Quick and simple to use, color buddy is the color expert in your pocket.
FxCamera A Free Camera App
FxCamera is a free, easy and creative camera app. With over 30 filters to choose from,we will assure you that every photo will turn out to be your favorite.
Typomapp – Navigate Typography
Featuring about 500 typographers from Gutenberg to the present day and more than 100 type foundries around the world, Typomapp can help you discover new things about typography or organize your knowledge in the field of letters. It is an unique approach in learning typography, correlating history and geography.
iFont (Expert of Fonts)
The app is designed to install beautiful fonts on your phone. You can download and use hundreds of fonts to cutify your phone. It ‘s easy to change system font! Beautiful fonts,Beautiful mood!
I Love Color
Access to thousands of colors, palettes and patterns. Share the colors and their hex code with your clients and friends.
IKEA Catalog
Just like the printed IKEA catalog, the 2014 digital IKEA catalog is packed with inspiration, home furnishing knowledge and ideas for free. This year, there’s a special focus on ideas for creating a better everyday life for families with children.
Dream Home
Explore a large variety of interior solutions created by professional architects and designers for your entire house or apartment. Browse through hundreds of photos of real interiors to find something special for every room in your house: we collected the best ideas for your living room, bedroom, kitchen, kids’ room and more! Build the home of your dreams!
AutoCAD 360
AutoCAD 360 is a free, easy-to-use drawing and drafting mobile app that allows you to view, edit, and share AutoCAD drawings—anytime, anywhere.
Colour Scheme PRO Asian Paints
ColourSchemePRO is an easy way to create custom colour combinations. Pick a colour from the 1800 Asian Paints Colour Spectra fandeck shades and allow the app to guide you to the perfect Monochromatic, Analagous or Complementary colour combinations.
Ovvvertime
A Really Great Dribbble Client For Android.
iDeviant – DeviantArt browser
iDeviant for Android is handcrafted application for flawless browsing in Deviations on DeviantArt. Application allows user go through 100 million submissions from 14.5 million members and their 140,000 submissions per day in many Categories from Photography, 3D design, Comics,Flash animations to Poetry.