Today, with the right apps, you can do all of that from your phone. For today’s designer, apps not only help with gathering design inspiration, but they can also handle the day-to-day minutia of your business, aid in client communication, assist in the actual design work, and even give you a mini-marketing department. Even if you don’t design for a living, these apps can help you keep your next at-home project on schedule and under budget. Check out the top 10 apps that every designer needs to have in their pocket. Not only can you create public and private boards, but you can also share them with clients (or friends), and ask your clients to pin on the same boards with you. You can source images from all over the internet and through your collection of photos on your phone, you can create a massive library of inspiration. Pinterest is a great place to start when working with clients to get a sense of their style. It’s also where you can begin your initial steps of collecting images and ideas before creating floor plans and layouts in Photoshop. Hootsuite helps you schedule your blog, Twitter, Instagram, and various other social media posts in all in one place. For a small monthly fee, Hootsuite can help you plan out all of your editorial content for the month. Best of all, you can read all of your social media feeds in one place. Hootsuite helps keep you in the know on what topics are trending on social media and the news so that you can create relevant content that your readers will love. This app will help you to set and manage install dates, rank tasks by priority and degree of completion, and add sub-tasks to help break big projects down into small assignments. You can even add photos to each to-do list, which will help you be clear in making assignments and specific in tracking progress. You can use this app daily as a virtual clipboard for all of the day-to-day tasks that you need to check off the list before the end of the day. All of your team members can work in the application at once, and updates can be shared instantly. This app allows you to create continual, yet non-intrusive, communication, with a team by dividing up the tasks through texts, reminders, checklists, photos, and more—all accessible anywhere and at any time. Does your client want to be reminded of their trip to Thailand or be surrounded by the same colors they remember from their childhood home in Greece? With this app, you can take a client’s vacation or family photos and turn them into the color schemes that will define their rooms. This app takes what would have been several weeks of work toiling on a desktop and spits out a color scheme in minutes. The app is also completely shareable, so you can see and comment on the work of others, and, more importantly, share your work with clients or collaborators in short order. This app is such a delight; you may find yourself tinkering with it just for fun. Simply take a photo of your favorite room and let the playtime begin. With Zoom, you can create a conference that is instantly joinable for up to 25 people. During the meeting, you can assign breakout groups for discussions among specific teams, “raise your hand” in a webinar, create a whiteboard effect for making collective lists, and even share screens, photos, and Dropbox files without having to leave the conference. Working over 3G and 4G networks as well as WiFi, this level of web video communication will allow you to work from almost anywhere while staying connected with multiple teams across multiple projects. So whether you run a small team or an entire design firm, stay on top of things while preserving your freedom of movement.
