10 iPhone Apps Every Graphic Designer Should Know About

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Guest post from Rob – He is head of photography for Designbysoap.co.uk, specialising in architectural and music photography . He’s also asearch engine optimisation engineer, and often helps out with digital marketing and loves graphic design. Follow him on Twitter: @designbysoap – If you want to write a guest post please see here

As mobile devices become more prevalent, and work on the go more common and demanding, isn’t it about time, as a designer, you had lots of handy tools in your pocket? Now, with the vast range of applications available for the iPhone, it is possible to carry a whole arsenal of tools with you. Here are some of the most useful ones:

1. Kuler Web App – FREE
If you don’t know about Kuler already, you should. Now a third party, Pixelfumes, brings Kuler to mobile devices, so you can pick beautiful colour schemes whilst on the go, whilst making use of Adobe’s excellent Kuler UI.

2. iBlueSky – $9.99
iBlueSky is a mind mapping app, designed for recording brainstorms, or leading you down new paths of thought. At $9.99, it’s one of the most expensive apps we looked at, but the interface works really well, and being able to export the final image as a jpeg or png is a real bonus.

3. Dexiner News & Events – FREE
The well known design news, events and resources site now offers a free app to keep you up to date with all the latest news in the design world. Invaluable.

4. CliqCliq Colours – $2.99
Colours is the perfect tool for designers to grab colours from the world around us. It allows the user to either snap a picture or select one from the camera roll, then create colour palettes from that image. This incredible tool is a must have for designers really, and something I find myself using almost daily.

5. Airmouse – $5.99
Airmouse, as the title suggests, lets you turn your iPhone into a full screen touchpad with keyboard and programmable extra buttons. It also includes a feature called ‘gyroscopic mouse control’, enabling you to wave the phone around in the air to move the cursor. Ok, so it’s not exactly design related, but it’s a lot of fun!

6. What The Font – FREE
If you don’t already know about this, it’s a free online service run by MyFonts.com, whereby you can upload images of text, it will scan it and give you matches, with options to buy. The iPhone version works in much the same way, but allows you to snap pics, then upload to the font identifier and find out. Excellent if you spot a font on a magazine or billboard and want to find out what it is.

7. Font Combinations – $1.99
Struggling for inspiration? Just can’t find the right font to go with your title? Look no further, BonFX brings the font combination app. With only 45 fonts it is possible to create over 2000 different combinations, with helpful suggestions from the app. It becomes quite addictive trying different combos and, ultimately, very useful indeed.

8. Design Ruler – $0.99
Sounds simple, but could be just the thing you need when away from the office or on site. With 5 different unit types and a huge range of scales, this really is an invaluable app for anyone, maybe not just designers either.

9. Evernote – FREE
A bit of an ‘old school classic’ as far as apps go. Enables you to take notes in whichever way you feel most comfortable, video, audio, text etc, then sync it with your mac or p.c. to retrieve all the results. A no-brainer?

10. Font Game – $0.99
Billed as ‘The rather difficult font game’, it should be called the surprisingly addictive font game. This app tests your font knowledge by presenting you with a font, then a selection of answers below. A fun, educational, little app for typophiles everywhere!