13 creative free iPhone apps for designers

(Image credit: Prisma)

The best free iPhone apps mean it's possible to stay creative even when away from your trusty Mac. There is an app to fulfill your every desire, and while there are plenty of paid options available, there are also loads of great free ones so you don't need to spend a penny to get hold of a creative iPhone app.

There are free iPhone apps across the creative spectrum, including 3D, illustration, graphic design, animation and photography.

The Pantone Studio app is a useful tool that allows you to build colour palettes and test them across a range of different designs including graphics, interiors, and typography. You can grab colours from the world around you using the camera on your device to use in your project, and though you have to pay a subscription to access the full range of Pantone colours, you do have some included in the free version of the app.

This app takes all the pain out of creating vector-based designs. Rather than laboriously building all of the shapes yourself (which is especially tricky on a small screen), Assembly provides a set of over 180 basic shapes for you to work with. You can layer, stack and position these shapes to create your own designs. With the latest version you can also create and share animated videos of your work.

You've probably heard of Paper. It's used by over 25 million people, and scores 4.5 stars in its 4.2k reviews on the App Store. This free iPhone app is designed to provide a space for its users to capture their ideas freely, offering ways to draw, handwrite notes, create diagrams, or sketch. Its gesture-based navigation is intuitive and it's easy to rearrange your pages, annotate your photos and group notes with sketches to keep things organised.

Adobe offers a range of free iPhone apps, and almost all of them are well worth a download. All you need is a Creative Cloud ID. Illustrator Draw is ideal for creating vector art on your phone. Like Assembly, it includes shape stencils for you to start with, and boasts several configurable pen tips and brushes, merge options and layer blend modes. You can work on canvases up to 8k, and send your layered files straight to Illustrator CC with just a tap.

The team behind Tayasui Sketches have worked tirelessly to offer the most realistic drawing tools possible, in a free iPhone app. There are over 20 tools, including impressively realistic watercolour brushes. It uses a layer-based workflow, and makes it easy to import and export PSD files. Tools are hidden away to keep the UI as clean as possible on the limited screen space. Find out more on the Tayasui Sketches website.

Many of us have a load of pre-digital photos languishing in drawers somewhere. Scanning and cropping photos is typically a bit of a laborious task, but this free iPhone app from Google makes it a whole lot simpler. Just shoot each print from a few different angles (the app ensures snaps are glare-free), and PhotoScan will automatically crop, enhance and rotate your image, giving you a pristine digital copy.

This free iPhone App boasts 120 million users and picked up Apple's App of the Year award back in 2016. Its main function is to apply photo effects to your snaps – specifically, ones that make them look like paintings. There are over 300 art styles in Prisma's effects library (and a new one added each day), so you can make your photos look like paintings by everyone from Picasso to Dali. Enhancement tools help you tweak the result.

Brushes was the original poster child for creative iPhone apps, and although the original developers have long given up on it, Christoffer Hoel decided to keep it alive with a completely rewritten, new version. Brushes Redux features a responsive OpenGL painting engine, records every stroke so you can replay your process, and is packed with all the brushes and settings you need to create amazing artwork at up to 4096 x 4096 resolution.

Another great free iPhone app from Google, Snapseed is designed to be a complete and professional photo editor. It comes packed with 29 tools and filters, all of which can be stacked and tweaked to help you get the perfect result. There's also an Insights feature with tips and tricks about both Snapseed and photography in general, so you can take better photos to start with. It works with both JPG and RAW files.

The real fun lies in running the benchmarking tests, which are beautiful mockups of a detailed and action-packed 3D game. They're a delight to watch, and once they're done you can find out how many frames per second your device can manage and just how good it is at simulating 3D physics. Sling Shot is aimed at up-to-date devices; if you want to give your old iPhone 5 a bit of a workout then go for 3DMark Ice Storm instead.

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The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of eight full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Ecommerce Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Editor, Digital Art and 3D Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson and Ecommerce Writer Beth Nicholls and Staff Writer Natalie Fear, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq.

13 creative free iPhone apps for designers

01. Filmmaker Pro

02. Pantone Studio

03. Assembly

04. Paper

05. Adobe Illustrator Draw

06. Tayasui Sketches

07. PhotoScan

08. Prisma Photo Editor

09. Brushes Redux

10. Snapseed

11. Adobe Spark Post

12. 3DMark Sling Shot

13. Behance

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