The UK creative industries contribute almost £90bn net to GDP, according to the Guardian. Whether you’re a designer, photographer or producer, your creative output is vital to the betterment of the wider UK. If you’re ever feeling a little bit stuck, or need some creative help, just remember that there’s an app for everything in 2017. With that in mind, we’ve put together this list of great creative apps that will help to get your juices flowing. If you’re feeling squeezed for mobile data, don’t worry, just order a SIM-only bundle from a provider like Asda Mobile and you can download to your heart’s content.
The act of preparing a meal is innately creative, taking advantage of the cook’s full array of senses to produce the desired dish. Now, Simmer helps you capture your creativity, enabling you to record short step by step videos of your preparatory process, helping other aspiring chefs learn from your instruction. Create, watch and share right from your very own kitchen.
If you’re not a full-time graphic designer, but you need to be able to sketch out a visual concept to a creative partner, an app like Assembly could be for you. It helps you to create beautiful vector imagery without having to master Illustrator. You can select from over 180 basic shapes that you can fit together to produce your own pieces of art, and place them over a plain backdrop or on top of a background image.
With a simple to use, yet innovative swipe-to-style formatting, Paper, lets you produce checklists and notes with ease. Capture and connect your notes, photos, and sketches in this brilliant designer-friendly digital wall. The original iPad version was crowned Apple’s App of the Year, and the new iPhone version is completely free, so there’s really no excuse to not own this brilliant inspiration provider.
This is a platform that should be in every creative’s toolbox. Both the website and the app are aimed at helping creative people get over their creative block through a range of instructional workshops, tricks, and techniques that help you in areas like, negative thinking, procrastination, and relationships. If you’re stuck and need help, you could definitely give this a go. Describing itself as an “in the moment digital coach”, Unstuck is your very own life coach in app form, and without the associated high costs.
If you believe that there’s no such thing as truly original art, then you should check out Behance. This is an online portfolio platform that’s specifically targeted at those working in the creative industries. If you’re a Photoshop pro, you can now push images directly to your own Behance portfolio, and if you’re browsing others portfolios, you can now share images straight to Pinterest – a new feature as of the 2.25 update. The phone app version of this platform is particularly slick, so give it a go.
These are only five of the plethora of apps out there designed to help creative do their jobs better. Give them a go and let us know what you think.