The 26 best iPhone apps for designers

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Despite some strong competition, the iPhone continues to be the main smartphone of choice for the design world. Apple's pocket-sized marvel can be a pretty handy design tool. Combined with the best iPhone apps it can pack some real punch in the studio – and more importantly, out of it.

• 23 best iPad art apps for painting and sketching

So whether you plan to do some sketching on the move, are after a particular tool to aid your daily design work, or prefer to take things more seriously with something to help you manage your projects, time and money, there's a great selection of must-have apps right here.

01. Assembly

• Developer: Pixite
• Price: Free with IAP

Coming off like a grown-up take on Fuzzy Felt, Assembly earns its place in the best iPhone apps list by enabling user to easily create beautiful vector imagery without having to master Illustrator's tricksy ways. Rather than painstakingly creating your own vector shapes, you can dive into Assembly's library of over 180 basic shapes that you can then fit together to make larger designs, either over a plain backdrop or on top of a background image. 

It's a building-block approach to design that might sound a little simplistic, but it's been put together intelligently and with just enough tools to enable you to craft detailed images in minutes – perfect for creating designs when you're on the move.

02. PANTONE Studio

Use this to match hues from photos, generate harmonious colour palettes and then share them

• Developer: Pantone
• Price: Free

This official app from the undisputed kings of colour acts as a digital swatch book, including over 13,000 colours from the Pantone Plus Series and beyond. You can use it to match hues from photos, generate harmonious colour palettes and then share them, or sync them with your design software programs of choice.

03. Paper

• Developer: FiftyThree
• Price: Free

Capable of capturing and connecting your notes, photos and sketches, Paper is one the best iPhone apps out there for designers – acting like a digital wall of sticky notes for your phone. Thanks to unique swipe-to-style formatting, Paper lets users quickly create checklists and notes, as well as clarifying details in photos. With the original iPad app crowned Apple's App of the Year, this new version for iPhone is a completely free must-have for designers.

04. Adobe Illustrator Draw

This app lets you create illustrations easily with intuitive touch controls

• Developer: Adobe
• Price: Free

Packed with all the power that designers have come to expect from Adobe, this app also includes all the popular drawing tools and features from Adobe Ideas. Filled with everything illustrators need to send layered and flat artwork, Adobe Illustrator Draw lets users draw with vectors, access high-res, royalty-free images, and sync assets to appear in your workflow wherever you need them.

05. Font Candy

Step up your photo game with this text masking app

• Developer: Easy Tiger Apps
• Price: Free

Create captions and overlay them onto photos with the typography app Font Candy. Choose from an array of hand-picked fonts to liven up your pictures and shoot snaps with a built-in camera with timer, perfect for taking selfies. One of the most creative and best iPhone apps around for typography, Font Candy also lets you share your work over Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram.

06. Exify

If this image gets your pulse racing, you need Exify

• Developer: Iconfactory
• Price: $1.99/£1.99

One of the best iPhone apps for pro photographers, Exify is a bunch of tools rather than a camera or editor. Fire it up and you can quickly delve into the fine details behind your pics: lens info; image size; colour space; exposure. There are graphs for histograms, location and time details, and also a magnifier for getting up close and personal with every little detail of your iPhone snaps.

07. Fuzel

• Developer: Not A Basement Studio
• Price: Free

Create cool photo collages for free with iPhone photography app Fuzel. With a wide variety of features and smooth UI, you can combine photos, add effects and write captions. The app imports images and cleverly places them so they fit within the chosen frame. You can then tap on any photo and realign, pinch to resize, add various filters as well as chose from different frames and borders.

08. Draw Pad Pro

An intuitive way to take notes

• Developer: Fishington Studios
• Price: £2.99

Nearly 3 million people use Draw Pad Pro for their note-taking. Created by Fishington Studios, the iPhone app offers a new way to get down your thoughts. Users can create sketches and scribbles, customise them, and then organise them to refer to later.

09. Layers

Layers for iPhone has everything you need to be creative on the go

• Developer: Gotow.net
• Price: $8.52/£5.99

Built on the feedback of mobile artists, Layers is a natural media painting application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Featuring Photoshop compatibility, a selection of brushes, full colour, paint, erase and smudge tools and the ability to add five layers to your drawings, this nifty little app has everything you need to be creative on the go.

10. PicLab Studio

Create inspiring images for the internet

• Developer: MuseWorks
• Price: $2.99/£2.29

PicLab Studio is a nifty app for creating those inspiring images that you get all over the internet these days. You know, the ones featuring a photo – probably with at least one retro filter applied – with a helpful aphorism layered over the top in an attractive, friendly typeface. PicLab HD makes them an absolute doddle, enabling you to either snap a photo or grab one from your photo library, then go to town on it.

Next page: 6 more of the best iPhone apps for designers

11. Filmic Pro

Packed with features, is this the ultimate iPhone video camera?

• Developer: FiLMiC
• Price: $14.99

FiLMiC Pro is, quite simply, the answer to the frustrations filmmakers have with Apple's default camera app. The most obvious and immediately useful features are the ability to set the focus and exposure separately, to lock them individually, and to lock the white balance. They're all vital for getting the tone and mood of what you're filming right, and FiLMiC knows that.

Video nuts will find wide-eyed glee in the ability to specify not only what resolution it films at, but also the framerate and, best of all, the bitrate, so you can record at quality far beyond the Apple defaults – great if you're filming lots of motion.

12. Path On

Path On lets you add funky text to photos in unique ways

• Developer: Peta Vision
• Price: $1.99/£1.49

Path On lets you add funky text to photos in unique ways. You draw the path you'd like the words to take, then type in your message – the text then flows along the path.

The custom options are the real killer feature here, with you being able to adjust the font, the letter spacing, the alignment and much, much more. There's a good range of fonts, and playing around is fast and easy. The photo filters are best avoided, but sharing your photo is easy.

13. Repix

Repix allows you to 'paint' filter effects onto images to create brilliant effects

• Developer: Sumoing
• Price: Free

The problem with filters in many photo editors is that you're required to apply them to the whole image, or spend an age creating precise selections. Repix lets you 'paint' filter effects onto your images to create brilliant effects.

A choice of nine brushes run along the bottom of the screen; they range from artistic effects such as Posterize and Charcoal to more creative effects such as Halftone patterns and Ink splats. There's also an eraser and an 'undoer' brush.

14. Behance

Behance's app is as slick as its online offering

• Developer: Behance
• Price: Free

We're huge fans of online portfolio platform Behance at Creative Bloq, especially its super-slick iPhone app. It offers many of the perks enjoyed by users of the online version, including the ability to search millions of projects and follow top creatives. Users can also access their personal profile and collections and view stats about their work, all on the go. 

15. Autodesk SketchBook

SketchBook Pro is one of the most popular iPad art apps

• Developer: Autodesk
• Price: Free

SketchBook Pro by Autodesk is one of the most popular iPad art apps with digital artists. The smaller-screen version is a brilliant addition to any designer's iPhone app collection.

There's a wide range of digital pencils, pens, markers and airbrushes to choose from (over 170 customisable brushes in total), all accessed via a simple but intuitive UI that lets you pin toolbars to the screen for easy access. You can work with layers, transparency options, annotations, and advanced blend modes. What more could you want?

16. Geló

Geló is a great way to apply gradients to your iPhone photos

• Developer: James Moore
• Price: Free

Gradients have become a lost art in iPhone photography, but Geló fills that gap in the market well. Once you've taken or imported an image, you see a carousel of 'gels'. Cycle through to choose a colour, tap it, and then it's applied to your shot. You can then use the sliders to tweak how the filter affects your shot, and it's this high level of control that makes Geló a winner.

You can adjust individual colours and the position of the effect until it gives you a realistic graduation (usually for a horizon), or you can get a bit arty and create vintage looks or use different shapes to add a 'gel collage' effect. You can also choose how the gel effect is applied, either a tint, a solid gel (Over) or mixed into the colour palette (Add). Coupled with contrast tweaks, you can create impressive images.

17. Evernote

Evernote allows you to store your inspiration

• Developer: Evernote
• Price: Free

Evernote allows you to save your ideas, things you like, things you hear and things you see. You can access your inspiration anywhere as it works with nearly every computer, phone and mobile device out there. And to make things easier, you can search by keyword, tag, or even printed and handwritten text inside images.

18. Instagram

Users can now share video and images to their Instagram 'story'

• Developer: Instagram
• Price: Free

Chances are, you don't need an introduction to this app. Instagram is a wildly popular photo-sharing app that enables its community (currently over 500 million-strong) to take pictures, apply digital filters to them, and share them on a variety of social networking services. Most recently, Instagram has introduced 'stories' that disappear after 24 hours. Used right, it can be a great source of design inspiration.

19. OmniFocus

OmniFocus has continued to develop and packs plenty of features

• Developer: The Omni Group
• Price: $39.99/£29.99

Having scooped the Apple Design Award for best productivity app when the iPhone App Store first launched, OmniFocus has continued to develop and packs plenty of features into its simple, intuitive interface. There's a high price tag, but it's invaluable for organising all your daily tasks in one place.

20. Palettes Pro

Palettes Pro lets you create colour palettes anywhere

• Developer: Rick Maddy
• Price: $3.99

This is a great way to create and manage colour palettes to use in your design work, whenever and wherever inspiration strikes. You can sample colours from images, websites or whatever you can find, as well as adding them manually.

21. Todo Cloud

Organise your projects into various related checklists

• Developer: Appigo
• Price: From free

The king of to-do apps, Todo enables you to add and schedule tasks, organise them into various related checklists, map deadlines onto your calendar and keep on top of every aspect of your working life. The basic version of this app is free, with the option to upgrade for the premium service.

22. Mill Colour

Mill colour manipulates your source image to help you replicate the look of a high-end digital suite

• Developer: The Mill
• Price: Free

This photo-grading tool feeds years of experience from colourists at leading Soho-based visual effects house The Mill into one free app. Rather than applying a grading filter, it manipulates your source image to help you replicate the kind of look and feel that might be achieved in a high-end digital suite.

23. Hipstamatic

A beautifully designed photography app that enables you to switch lenses, film and flash settings

• Developer: Hipstamatic
• Price: $2.99/£2.49

The winner of Apple's very first App of the Year, Hipstamatic enables you to switch lenses, film and flash settings to create and share highly stylised images. It's also highly expandable, with a broad range of special packs available for in-app purchase.

24. Adobe Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express has some useful tools for photo manipulation

• Developer: Adobe
• Price: Free

While many of the Touch suite are arguably best suited to iPad, Photoshop Express has some useful tools for photo manipulation on the go that can be just as valuable on iPhone – including filters, effects and basic editing tools. You can also upload files from your device, Creative Cloud, Dropbox, Facebook or Google Photos.

25. Over

One of the best iPhone apps for Instagram users, Over allows you to add type to your photos

• Developer: Over
• Price: Free

While a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes you need some words as well to let people know what they're looking at. Over is one of the best iPhone apps for Instagram addicts, Over enables you to add typography to your images quickly and easily. There's also a feature that lets you find the perfect canvas dimensions for Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, iPhone and even Apple Watch.

26. Fontli

Use Fontli to discover inspirational photography of type around the world

• Developer: Pramati Technologies
• Price: Free

Fontli is a social network of type lovers, enabling the community to collect and share inspiring examples of typography from everyday life. Using integration with MyFonts database, its iPhone app also features type tagging on pictures.

Related articles:

• The 33 best photo apps
• 10 apps for endless design inspiration
• The 28 best typography apps

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