Nothing beats the desktop set and the ecosystem of tools each designer has carefully chosen for their work. Despite how flexible and powerful desktop apps are, more and more often, we need to go mobile for various reasons. We might need to access files remotely, design on the go, plan projects and quickly design a post for our social media accounts. What matters is, that mobile apps have become essential. This is why we made a deep dive into GooglePlay and Apple App Store, to select 25 extremely convenient mobile apps for graphic designers that will make your life easier.
The following list includes tools for creating vectors, photo manipulation, collages, social media posts, finding fonts, picking and saving color palettes, finding inspiration, remote access for your documents, PDF scanner, magazines, and, in short, everything. It’s like a survival kit for graphic designers on the go. So why not jump right in.
1. Adobe Photoshop Mix
Let’s start with the classics by adding some serious Photoshop editing for mobile devices. Photoshop Mix is good for its wide range of capabilities such as cutting out and combining elements from different images and polish the result with blending options and enhancement options. It’s not a substitute for your chosen Adobe software tools you use for your desktop, but it’s a pretty decent mobile tool you can use on the go and get great results. Moreover, it’s extremely easy to use and it integrates with other Adobe tools.
Highlights:
- Cut our and remove sections from images
- Combing images
- Colors adjustment and presets
- Image enhancement
- Non-destructive editing
- Social Media direct sharing options
- Adobe Creative Cloud Integration
2. Adobe Capture
Adobe Capture is another great auxiliary tool from the series that can transform your images into building blocks. What this tool does is look through your camera to see patterns, vectors, and even fonts, turning them into design materials for you to later use in your preferred Adobe Creative Cloud programs. This way from a single photo, you create your own production-ready color themes, patterns, vector shapes, custom brushes, and even 3D materials.
Highlights:
- Turns images into clean vectors with 1-32 colors
- Identifies fonts
- Creates color palettes
- Captures gradients
- Builds custom brushes from elements
- Generates 3D textures
- Captures light and color
- Adobe Creative Cloud integration
3. Autodesk Sketchbook
This is probably one of the cleanest and easiest to use drawing tools I’ve ever worked with both for desktop and iPad. It’s very intuitive and you can immediately start using it by yourself without the need for additional tutorials. There are a lot of convenient tools such as perspective guides, a curved ruler, symmetry tools, and other pleasant surprises. My only pain with the mobile version is the lack of an actual crop tool which is definitely something to be desired in a newer version.
Highlights:
- Perspective Guides
- Customize, Infinite, and Constrained Grid tools
- Curve ruler, for drawing curves you can’t get with the Ellipse tool
- Support for the new Apple Pencil
- Support for Scan Sketch for the new iPad
4. Adobe Spark Post: Poster & Graphic Design Editor
The app packs a library of modern and professionally-looking templates you can customize as you wish. You can tweak by adding filters, fonts, shapes, icons, typography styles, new color palettes and ultimately create flyers, collages, and other promo material for your social media accounts.
Highlights:
- Animated Video Posts
- Design Filters
- Auto Resize
- Auto Recolor
- Magic Text
- Text Effects
- Magic Layout
- Text Cutouts
5. Find My Font
This app will help you identify any font in an image no matter free or commercial. It often happens to see a poster, a flyer, or a t-shirt and simply love the font and want to have it in our library. If you’re in such a situation, all you have to do is take a picture with your camera and let the tool do its magic.
Highlights:
- You can take a photo or use an existing gallery image
- Identifies any Latin letter using an online database of 150.000+ fonts
- Includes 60.000 freemium and free fonts
- It shows you both an exact match and a list of similar fonts to choose from
6. Color Reference
- Available for: Android
- Price: Free
Colors, palettes, and wallpapers for fellow color lovers to discover new color schemes and get inspiration for designs.
Highlights:
- You can browse colors by RGB, HEX, and HSL
- Create and save new colors
- Find harmonic and complementary colors
- Create your own color palettes of up to 5 colors
- Pick colors from images
- Create awesome wallpapers
7. Pantone Connect
The essential app for graphic designers is plain and simple. This is the color inspiration for your design in one place making it easy for you to measure and match physical materials to Pantone Color. Also, you can share your inspirational color palettes to your social accounts, or navigate any updated Pantone Color System to find the perfect hue.
Highlights:
- All Pantone Colors are always up to date
- sRGB and Hex values for all colors
- Measurement with the Pantone Color Match Card
- Color extraction from images
- Sharing to social media
- Color library search
- Pantone system X-Ref
- Trending color palettes from Pantone
8. Behance: Photography Graphic Design, Illustration
Behance needs no introduction. Most importantly, the place for the world’s most talented designers has an app for your mobile platform of choice. Same as in the platform on your browser, the app offers to create accounts, share your work, browse other creators’ work, create mood boards, watch live streams, and so on.
Highlights:
- Browse work by creatives you follow
- Build mood boards from the projects that inspire
- Share your own projects
- Watch live streams
- Get notifications
- Send and receive private messages and job opportunities.
9. Coolors
A simple minimalist app for you to quickly sample colors from your images or create random colors.
Highlights:
- Hex codes
- Color harmony algorithms
- 1000 Random Colors
- Matching colors in camera mode
- Adding swatches to favorites
- Creating a palette based on a photo
- Creating palettes randomly
10. Vectornator
- Available for: iOS
- Price: Free
Vectonator for iPad and iPhone (PadOS13 & iOS13 and later) currently comes for free with no hidden additional costs. At the moment the product is in a building state and the developing team is looking for feedback to improve it further. The tool is an AIO product with vector tools, advanced features, and an intuitive interface.
Highlights:
- Pen, Node, Brush, and Shape tools for detailed vectors
- Align, Group, Mask, Order, Scale, Rotate, and Duplicate options
- Corner radius, Boolean, combining, separating, outlining paths
- Typography tool with full control over line height, kerning, tracking, font import, ability to outline text, and placing it on a path.
- Auto Trace for turning bitmap images into vectors
- Artboards
- Iconator library
- Color Picker with support for Gradients, Palettes, Hex input, HSB, RGB, Color blending, and Wide color gamut
11. Procreate Pocket
- Available for: iOS
- Price: $4.99
Procreate is optimized for iPhone under the name of Procreate Pocket. Surely, it’s not exactly the same experience you probably expect from the iPad version. However, it’s still very powerful in terms of features, especially for a smaller screen. It still offers hundreds of brushes, an advanced layer system, and the new Valkyre graphic engine.
Highlights:
- Up to 16k by 4k canvases
- dark mode
- Quick Shape feature
- Smooth and responsive smudge sampling
- Responds to shortcuts from a connected keyboard
- autosave
- 250 undo-redo levels
- 100s brushes with customizable settings
- Full-featured layering system
12. Retrospecs
- Available for: iOS
- Price: Free
The retro computing pixel art camera art for all of you lovers of 70s, 80s, and 90s aesthetics. This app brings your photos and videos into visuals from a huge variety of home computers and consoles from that time. And when I say huge, I mean over forty systems, including the one and only, the original 1984 Apple Macintosh.
Highlights:
- Stylistic of over forty systems including Commodore 64, IBM PC (DOS, CGA, EGA, and VGA), Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Sega Mega Drive, Nintendo Game Boy, and 1984 Apple Macintosh
- Create your own custom modes based on four different graphics engines
13. Assembly: Graphic Design & Art
- Available for: iOS
- Price: Free
Assembly is a great pocket app to design on the go from finished vector art to logos and icons. You can rough out designs by combining elements and shapes, and move to complex groups of graphics from there. The interface is very simple and intuitive, also.
Highlights:
- Bezier curves for point-editing
- Combine, cut out and intersect shapes
- Import SVG, PNG, and JPG. Export SVG, PNG, PDF, and JPG up to 8192 x 8192
- Multi-select and nested grouping
- Copy, flip and rotate shapes and groups
- Save groups and projects to the custom shape pack
- Fill, stroke, and shadow options
- 35 pre-made color palettes
14. Font Candy Photo & Text Editor
- Available for: iOS
- Price: Free
Another great tool for your social media accounts. Font candy photo is a simple app that you can use to add quotes, artwork, colors, filters, and layer multiple images. It’s great for your inspirational posts, stories, and even designing iPhone cases, t-shirts, and magnets. Very fun to use and get creative with.
Highlights:
- Over 45 artistic, hand-picked fonts.
- Text curving, opacity controls, and shadow.
- Multiple captions
- Built-in custom Artwork and Quotes
- Fun animations
- Scale and Crop options
15. CREATE: Graphic Design + Fonts
- Available for: iOS
- Price: Free
Graphic design and drawing app for iPhones and iPads. You can use images, fonts, shapes, lines. You can create logos, UI elements, vectors, collages for your social media, mood boards, and everything else.
Highlights:
- Layers, group layers
- Edit text, typography, fonts
- Edit stroke/fill
- Transform shapes
- Rounded corners
- Custom color gradients
- Make Snapchat Geofilters
- Set canvas size, grid spacing
- Snap to grid/object
- Install fonts
- Supports Apple Pencil
16. DesignLab – Graphic Design
- Available for: iOS
- Price: Free
There’s another simple but efficient pocket app for creating sophisticated designs with a rich gallery of images, fonts, templates, and everything you might need for your social media presence.
Highlights/Usage:
- Instagram stories + highlights
- Social media graphics
- Typography design
- Event promotion
- Birthday cards & invitations
- Special sales offers
- Real estate promotion
- Pinterest posts
- Business cards
- Inspirational quotes
- Memes
17. Logo Maker – Logo Foundry
Recommended professional suite for logo designs with a whole library of built-in tools. If you’re in a hurry and have to create your logos on the go or you simply had this amazing idea and need to put it down. Instead of sketching, you can use this tool to quickly and easily bring life to your idea. It’s very easy to use not only by professional designers but also by people without previous experience with design software.
Highlights:
- 3000+ symbols, shapes, and icons
- Search function
- Advanced text editing tools
- Advanced text layouts such as Circular Text and Wavy Text
- Layer management functions
- Export to Transparent PNG or Flat JPG files
- Save, Restore and Reuse logo templates
- Tools to Mirror, Flip Horizontal/Vertical
- Undo & Redo
- Monograms Support
18. Obscura 2
- Available for: iOS
- Price: $4.99
This app basically enhances the capabilities of the camera you already have on your iPhone/ iPad. It does this by adding pro features, a convenient control wheel in the range of your tumb, beautiful filters, and a wide range of formats.
Highlights:
- Formats: RAW, HEIC, JPEG
- Live Photo, Depth
- 19 filters (Sepia, Black and White pack, analog filter pack)
- Flash control
- Grids
- Shutter Timer
- Spirit Level
19. Trello
Trello is a visual organizer that uses boards, lists, and cards for you to use when you’re planning your projects. Whether you have a great idea for a particular project you need to write down, or simply wish to sort your to-do list, it’s easy to do so. You can also add checklists, labels, due dates, locations, and switch to a calendar view.
Highlights:
- Drag and drop
- Simple boards, lists, and cards creation
- Checklists, due dates
- Calendar view
- Map View
- Offline work
20. Parallels Access
Can’t fail to add a remote access app to the list. It is very important to have access to your files all the time, especially in urgent situations, so this is a very handy thing to have. The tool allows you to access your Windows and Mac applications and files from your mobile device and edit complex documents.
Highlights:
- The Premium version ($2.99) lets you access up to 5 computers
- Requires free Parallels Access Agent on your Mac/PC installation
- You can install Parallels access on Macs with an M1 chip
- Compatible with iPad 2 and later, including iPad mini, and with iPhone 4S and later
21. Imagine FX
- Available for: iOS
- Price: Free (in-app purchases)
This is the only magazine specifically with fantasy and SciFi digital artists in mind. The issues feature in-depth workshops from the world’s greatest artists in the genre, galleries, interviews, community news, and reviews. If you’re an artist who loves fantasy and SciFi, this is definitely something you want to check out. Just note that the digital edition isn’t printable.
Highlights:
- Free trial offer for new subscribers
- Subscription will include the current and future issues for the duration of your subscription
22. 3D World
- Available for: iOS
- Price: Free (in-app purchases)
An interactive online magazine with video tutorials, image slideshows, text-free artwork, animation, and VFX. Every issue features tutorials by working professional artists, with hours of video training and tutorial files that you can download.
Highlights:
- Coverage of 3ds Max, Maya, ZBrush, Photoshop, After Effects, Cinema 4D, and Houdini
- Back issues, specials, and future issues are available for purchase within the app
- Behind the scenes of new movies, commercials, and animation shorts
- Tutorials by working professional artists
- Downloadable content
23. Inspire Pro
- Available for: iOS
- Price: $19.99
An alternative to Procreate, this tool is for realistic painting, drawing, and sketching. It has some really amazing and absolute pleasure to use brushes, all divided into 15 sets. This includes oil paint, airbrushes, splatter, graphite pencils, spray paint, wax crayons, markers, charcoals, patterns, and textures. It’s very smooth in terms of experience.
Highlights:
- Sorcery 64-bit painting engine
- 150 brushes, including dual texture
- Apple Pencil support
- 20 keyboard shortcuts
- 1000 levels of undo/redo
- Touch and slide hotspots
- Canvas Playback Video Recording
- Full-Featured Color Picker
24. Concepts
- Available for: iOS
- Price: Free (in-app purchases)
In a nutshell, this is a pocket whiteboard. It’s an infinite canvas for you to write notes, doodle, draw storyboards, and plans, make mood boards and share with your friends and clients.
Highlights:
- Infinite canvas with paper types and grids
- Realistic pens, pencils, and brushes with pressure
- Customizable tool wheel
- COPIC color wheel
- Vector-based sketching
- Drag+drop images + PDF files
- Unlimited layers / adjustable opacity
- Vector object libraries synced across devices
- Guides, scale, and measurement tools
25. Simple Scan
- Available for: Android
- Price: Free
And our last recommendation on the list is a pretty handy little app for android devices that takes the role of a pocket scanner. It’s a PDF scanner for your physical documents, photos, receipts, reports, and whatever you need to put into a digital file.
Highlights:
- Automatically removes the clutter of background
- Scan color, grayscale, or black and white
- Automatically detects page edges
- 5 levels of contrast
- Set the PDF page size
- Backup and restore synchronization files between multiple devices
- Automatically upload JPG and PDF files to the cloud disk
Final Words
Reaching the end of this list, we hope you collected a handful of mobile tools that will make your life as a graphic designer easier. From logo design software to organizing and scanning tools, there is an app for everything.
In the meantime, if you seek to expand your toolset and cover every part of your workflow, you can also check some great recommendations for software in our previous articles.
