GET CREATIVE
Apps for creators
Whether your creative niche involves designing, illustrating or idea generation, the App Store has lots of handy tools to support you. Here are a few that will elevate your creative process to new heights.
Organising ideas
Starting out with a clear outline of your ideas is key to the success of your final product. Yet articulating those ideas, along with other considerations like client requests, product formats or material properties, can be daunting. That’s where MindNode 6 comes in; the brainstorming app helps you flesh out one thought into an intuitive mind map of ideas that you can then evolve from your screen into action.
To create your map, expand from one core idea by adding related elements called ‘nodes’. These nodes can then branch off into sub-nodes, which can subsequently branch off into sub-nodes of their own. You can arrange nodes in order of priority or create a cause-and-effect relationship between them. Mind-mapping like this means you won’t forget or duplicate elements from your thought process, and it’s a clever way to quickly arrange ideas, particularly as the app handles the structure and formatting for you with multiple themes and colours to choose from.
The best ideas grow from a distraction-free, focused space, and MindNode is the ideal place to cultivate your ingenuity.
Feeling inspired
Inspiration can strike at any moment, often when you’re away from your desk. Imagine you pass some street graffiti when you’re out and about and envisage a cool new logo design – you’ll need to capture that idea before it disappears.
Step up Adobe Capture. The all-encompassing design app transforms the images from your iPhone or iPad into colour themes, patterns, type, materials, brushes and shapes. For example, select Type from the asset bar and it will automatically recognise and capture the text in your photos and retrieve similar fonts from the Typekit subscription font library provided by Adobe; or use Colors to detect the shades in the scene captured by your camera, along with the RGB and CMYK values.
All your assets can then be saved to your Adobe Creative Cloud libraries so you can access them from your Creative Cloud account in compatible apps.
Then-and-there creativity
Do you tend to concoct great ideas all of a sudden while you’re out of the office, in a meeting say or while musing over lunch? Time to get to know Concepts, the powerful professional tool for sketching out your ideas in a focused, precise way.
Set up your workspace to suit either right-handed or left-handed preferences and tailor your tool wheel to make it quick and easy to jump into your creative flow. Sketch using pencil, liquid pen, CAD-like wires, marker, live-blend watercolours and more, and add colours using the custom colour sets.
When linked with Adobe Creative Cloud, data can be exported in high-resolution formats such as PNG, SVG, DXF (CAD) and PSD, so you can streamline your workflow, share with others or continue developing by linking with other apps.
Colour anytime, anywhere
Being able to carry over 10,000 colour swatches around on your iPhone or iPad is every creative’s dream. With the PANTONE Studio app, you’ll be able to find colours from thousands of samples. Spot a cool shade in a picture on your Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook accounts, or on your Camera Roll and you can use the app to extract colour from the image.
Or take a picture and use the app’s colour picker to compile a custom palette. And before you commit to a definite hue for your designs, use the app to test out palettes so you can see what works. Everything can be shared with your Creative Cloud account too.
Support from the right tools
Elegant tools in themselves can be hugely inspirational for your creative output and Actions by Moleskine is one such noteworthy app that makes formulating your best ideas, simple. From organising your schedule, to creating lists of Actions and completing a Logbook when they’re done, this app gives that all-important daily support that helps you prioritise, focus and get more done – so you can get down to the main business of creating.
And to make connections with other incredible creators around the world, check out Behance and Dribbble. Both apps are a hub for showcasing top creative talent across all genres. You can follow designers whose work you admire and when you yourself post, you’ll be highlighting your own creations to a global audience of like-minded professionals.