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About the author:This guest article was written by Emma Best from Laptopical - a guide to the latest laptop reviews and laptop related news. You can also follow her on Twitter.

1. Best App For Graphic Design
2. Graphic Design Software Free
3. Graphic Design App Mac Free Software
4. Graphic Design On Mac

Create beautiful designs with your team. Use Canva's drag-and-drop feature and layouts to design, share and print business cards, logos, presentations and more. The most popular of all free photo editing software, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and is highly-supported and frequently updated. Comparative to Photoshop, users can perform basic tasks such as photo retouching, color correction, and image size, or more complicated tasks like image composition and creation.

I've been using my MacBook Pro since a while now and I must say: I really love it. The most common app(s) that designers use has to be Adobe Photoshop (Or the full suite). The app(s) are great, but there is a downside: The price tag. Photoshop CS4 costs $699, CS4 extended is $999 and the full Creative Suite starts at an stunning $1799. For many people this is just a little bit too much to 'play around with'.

Luckily, there are also many free applications out there that can do the same kind of job that Photoshop could do for you. This article rounds up the best 15 free Mac Programs for Graphic Designers. Some of these applications can even do stuff that can't be achieved using Photoshop, or are much more simple to use.

If you own a business and you want to create an attractive logo that will help you in building your brand, then you must download this free Logo Maker Mac app. Logo Maker is a logo creator which you can use to come up with a logo design or idea that your target audience or clients will instantly fall in love with.

Keep your wallet in your pocket, since all these programs will cost you nothing.

GIMP

The most popular of all free photo editing software, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and is highly-supported and frequently updated. Comparative to Photoshop, users can perform basic tasks such as photo retouching, color correction, and image size, or more complicated tasks like image composition and creation. GIMP has a scripting interface for advance users, as well as plugins, extensions, and filters.

Completely free access to hundreds of fun and powerful features. GIMP One of the most powerful general-purpose image editors around, the upgrades make the GNU Image Manipulation Program eminently comparable to Photoshop. Browse and download Graphics & Design apps on your Mac from the Mac App Store. The Mac App Store has a wide selection of Graphics & Design apps for your Mac. Now available: Real-time collaboration with Coediting (beta). Design together with your team to create faster and keep everyone on the same page. With Adobe XD, you get one powerful tool for your whole UI/UX design process. Create user flows, wireframes, high-fidelity designs, interactive prototypes.

Best App For Graphic Design

Seashore

Graphic Design Software Free

If you want GIMP, but don't have X11, then Seashore is the appropriate software for you. Based on GIMP, it has nearly all the settings and functions of the more advanced program without the higher requirements.

Inkspace

An excellent alternative to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw, Inkscape is a free vector graphics program supporting standard SVG format, as well as XML and CSS standards. This program can do everything you'll need in a vector graphics program - tracing, path operations, direct XML editing, etc. Import and export formats include all the common image types, including JPEG, PNG, and TIFF.

Front End Digital Media Workshop

Don't waste time manually resizing individual photos for your various projects. Front End Digital Media is a batch conversion app for images (as well as video and audio), and allows you to mass resize, resample, split, join, and up/down sample JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, PSD, and PICT image files.

Image Tricks

The biggest appeal for the Image Tricks app is the ability to apply dozens of different filters to over 20 different image formats. The finished photos can then be exported as either TIFF, JPEG, or PNG.

Comipro Plus

If you create cartoons of any type, Comipro Plus is an excellent app. Designed in Japanese but usable to English speakers, this program helps create modern-looking comics, including editing and adding word bubbles.

Google SketchUp

Different from a normal vector graphics program, Google's SketchUp allows you to not only create a design, but view it in 3D. It is easier to use than more complicated 3D software, such as AutoCAD, and is free.

Colorate

Colorate is used to change and manipulate the colors in a photo. The Library generates a color swatch based on the photo, then allow you to add a new color pallete, either blending the current one, creating a custom one, or randomizing a completely new pallete.

Goldberg

This program is best used for those times when you're viewing your photos, and notice that a color is slightly off, or a side needs cropped a bit more. Instead of firing up a full photo editing application, you can simply make minor adjustments, including color correction, blurs, noise, and embossing.

NIH Image

If you need to animate one of your photos or designs, this program is for you. It's compatible with a wide array of programs, and in addition to animating images, it can also perform minor tweaks to contrast, sharpening, smoothing, filters, and more. It also analyzes particles, angles, and paths.

Scratch

This program is so simple, it can be used also immediately with no prior instruction. It is used for creating small games, interactive art, and animated stories, and is primarily marketed to children. Despite it's juvenile market, it is an excellent tool for putting together quick interactive banners and images without the learning curve.

DAZ Studio

If you're in need of realistic 3D models, DAZ Studio is an easy-to-learn 3D program for creating 3D objects, including people, animals, and objects (buildings, cars, etc). DAZ Studio is easier to use than other 3D animation tools, and is perfect for creating surrealistic and 3D art.

Bryce

Built to run with the aforementioned DAZ Studio software, Bryce is used to create real-looking landscapes using photos of real landscapes. Take a picture of your yard, a forest, some mountains, or other landscapes, import it into Bryce, and then add all the elements needed to turn it into a new world.

ArchiCAD

The brand is always coming up with new and inventive ways to connect with their audience, such as the reveal of the useful Spectrum TV App. The company is one of the top choices in entertainment in the country and is expanding their coverage areas continuously to provide quality TV and Internet to everyone.Spectrum is known for offering exceptional package deals on their services along with free installation, free wi-fi setup, and free DVR service when you bundle services together. Spectrum is a TV, Voice and Internet service provider that is owned by Charter Communications.

If you need a 3D design tool with more power and features than Google SketchUp, ArchiCAD is the right program to you. Similar to AutoCAD in both function and name, this program allows users to design their sketches and ideas into a realistic 3D render.

JAlbum

Every graphic designer requires an efficient way to keep all their photos and images organized. JAlbum is the ultimate photo organizer, as it not only allows you to organize your photos and folders using simple drag-and-drop functionality, but it also creates thumbnails and HTML pages of your photos for easy online publishing. The HTML pages to publish can be made to either export a gallery or a slide show. In addition, there's support for IPTC and EXIF data, lossless editing, image filters, style sheets, and an integrated FTP client.

Bonus: Pixelmator

I've added Pixelmator myself to this list, as Emma didn't include this app to her top 15 list. I really love to use Pixelmator myself and I don't think it should be missing from this amazing list.

Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images.

Bonus: Blender

Just like Pixelmator, I've added Blender myself to this list, as Emma didn't include this app to her top 15 list. Blender is a great open source app for 3d content.

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Are there more Mac Apps that you, as a graphic designer, love to use that is missing from the list above? Please share!

This guest article was provided to you by Emma Best from Laptopical.

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Graphic Design App Mac Free Software

Apps For Graphic Design

If there is one industry in particular that continues to benefit from ongoing software refinement its graphic design. Progress in this industry tends to well up from the user base as much as it trickles down from the programmers with the result being a continuous chain of upgrades, add-ons and entirely new graphic design apps for Android and iOS hitting the market on practically a weekly basis. Design apps for work are not like backpacks for work. You can’t touch them, carry them or put things in them. Yet they’re crucial to your success. Below are 20 of today’s best apps for graphic design.

1. Adobe Photoshop Touch

Adobe Photoshop Touch is a remarkably effective tool for your mobile device. While the smartphone and tablet versions are slightly different they should both be considered a must-have digital kit for the graphic designer on the go. There’s plenty of advanced functionality in play here including the ability to do things like color correcting on hi-res images on your handset while you’re stuck in traffic in the back of a taxi. Another reason Touch winds up atop our list of best graphic design apps is because of its broad compatibility with a full range of mobile platforms; which is something that can’t be said of all the graphic design applications out there.

2. Adobe Illustrator Draw

Draw lets you use vector drawing tools to create dazzling freeform illustrations right on your mobile device. It provides the kind of creative freedom for mobile users that have long been rumored but until now were always “coming soon”. Draw can’t realistically compete with the desktop version of Illustrator yet, but its array of tool offerings is broad enough and community support deep enough that it may create a whole new genre of illustration and a corresponding new category of illustrators. Maybe the most astonishing thing about Draw is that this mobile graphic design app is free. And that’s likely to make a lot of people think twice about renewing their CC subscriptions next time around. As such, smart money says the “free” label has an expiration date. So, get it while you can.

3. Evernote

Evernote is one of those buffet design apps we mentioned at the outset. It’s not going to help you spruce up your Illustrator Draw creations but it will help the busy graphic design pro stay organized, move work down the production line and sync their efforts with clients and coworkers. Evernote began life as a free app but the developers have moved aggressively away from that egalitarian model over the past year or two. Now the free app has become little more than an elaborate advertisement for its pay-to-play cousins while the Plus and Premium apps are where the real actionable features are. Still, it’s well worth the minimal investment (although good luck trying to figure out their cloud storage policies).

4. Assembly

Assembly is more oriented toward beginning designers who haven’t really developed a sense of their own style yet but who are nonetheless driven to create. The people behind assembly might take exception to that characterization but it’s true. Not that there isn’t something here for the accomplished designer too. There is. But the emphasis is on utilizing pre-made objects and shapes to quickly patch together logos, icons, basic scenes, backgrounds and other building block elements of design. Assembly makes good use of the screen real estate and its tap-and-drag dynamic is well suited to mobile platforms. Maybe one of the best basic graphic design apps for iPhone. And that’s saying something.

5. Paper

Paper has about as much to do with actual paper as the word “cafe” has to do with actual cold brew coffee makers. Nonetheless, it does a great job of helping you connect your doodles, notes and concepts, organize your to-do lists and reminders, put those pics from your travel camera to work and emerge from the forest of confusion and forgotten appointments into the world of the organizationally astute. Paper was launched with much fanfare back in 2012 and has a solid base of believers that expands slowly yet inexorably every year. And it’s totally free. Although, if you don’t have an iPhone that won’t really matter.

6. Pixlr

Pixlr has been around for a while and it always amazes us that this feature-rich, easy-to-use free online photo editor isn’t more popular than it is. It’s the closest thing to Adobe’s epoch-defining software app you’re going to find anywhere and it’s absolutely free. Pixlr was firmly established in the cloud while most folks were still getting familiar with the external hard drive. In the years since it was introduced it’s been continually refined and now boasts more than 600 effects along with all the layering, cropping, color management and other features you’d normally expect from programs that specialize in draining your bank account. Pixlr is fully compatible with both Android and iOS platforms and should be on every graphic designer’s radar.

7. Pantone Studio

Pantone Studio is another of those buffet design apps that addresses a specific need of the graphic designer. Pantone provides you the ability to harvest Pantone colors from the environment, assemble your own color palettes and use them to create nextgen graphics. These can then be easily exported to your graphic design editing programs and shared with coworkers, clients and friends. When it comes to graphic design color is king and Pantone Studio helps ensure the colors in your design are both accurate and – just as important – reproducible. Create palettes that are geo-specific, then tag them and save them for future reference. You’ll be light years ahead of the competition with Pantone Studio in your arsenal.

8. Snapseed

At one time not long ago Snapseed was considered a must-have app for designers who worked from their handsets. Recently, however, Google remade their photo editing app and the results have been something less than spectacular. Gone are some of Snapseed’s most popular off-the-beaten-track filters like “grunge” and in their place are a few ho-hum standard design app features like “lens blur”. As a result, the newly reimagined app has the notable distinction of being less imaginative then before. Still, the things it does it does well and so you’d be unwise not to have it on your smartphone or tablet.

9. Layers

Some might see Layers as a way to create finished artwork and design but for our money it’s more of a digital sketchpad that lets you empty your brain in a productive way while you’re sitting in the break room, riding on the subway, having lunch in the park or just lying on your sofa zoning out on a lazy Sunday afternoon. There are a number of basic tools to play with including a decent selection of brushes, an eraser a smudge tool and the ability to work on up to 5 layers per piece. Sometimes the hardest part of a project is finding a way in. Layers will help you do that.

10. Marksta

Marksta allows you to easily watermark your creations and/or add a logo or some text to your project right from your late model iPhone. Marksta has recently set its sights on busting free of standard boutique design app constraints however, by introducing a steady stream of new functions. Those include basic color management, the ability to add customized borders, the ability to adjust opacity, to reverse text, to save templates, view all of your changes in real time and more. But while those new features point toward a more robust design app down the road, at the moment Marksta is still a watermark app first and foremost. And still one of those graphic design apps for iphone only.

11. Typecast

Typecast is an impressive WYSIWYG for web designers that provides exacting control over typography and allows you to export web-ready HTML and CSS. With Typecast you can make global style changes in the blink of an eye, add custom styles via the built in CSS editor, style headings, subheadings, paragraphs and more with a few taps and share your labors via a working prototype that clients and coworkers can test drive and comment on. Since launching in 2011 Typecast has been continually refined and reshaped and every month it gets a little more impressive and a little harder to ignore.

12. WhatTheFont

Ever run across an incredible font you just can’t place? Well, before that happens again download WhatTheFont. With WTF identifying an unusual or unusually compelling font is no harder than taking a photo of the font in question and loading that picture into the app. WhatTheFont scans the photo, extracts the font and checks it against a vast database of known fonts before providing you with a number of potential matches. There are a number of font identification apps out there but WhatTheFont is perhaps the most consistently accurate. Which is what makes it one of our best graphic design apps.

13. Mailstrom

In spite of predictions that it was on the cusp of becoming obsolete the number of emails sent each day worldwide in 2017 was estimated at 269 billion (with a “b”). By 2020 that number is expected to grow to more than 306 billion emails per day. If you’re like most design professionals you probably feel like half of those emails wind up in your inbox. But don’t despair, because Mailstrom is here to help you grab the email bull by the horns and bring it under control. You may not think of Mailstrom as being one of the many graphic design apps for Android, and strictly speaking it’s not. What it is, however, is a way to organize, bundle, unsubscribe, prioritize and delete the clutter in your mailbox for about 5 bucks a month.

14. iA Writer

The most common question that arises in relation to iA Writer is: “Why would I abandon Word for something with a much less robust feature set?” The answer is iA Writer is geared toward those who prefer to just write and leave all the formatting stuff until later. Truth be told, iA Writer is nothing more than a beefed-up version of Notepad: a no-nonsense app that eschews design considerations in favor of giving you the space you need to concentrate on the words themselves. Once you’ve composed your masterpiece you can then copy it into Word if you like and make it all presentable. Or slide it over to the web team for formatting. And that’s its biggest strength: it’s easily shareable and doesn’t produce formatting you can’t use on a PDF or website.

15. ScannerPro

ScannerPro allows you to create PDFs with searchable text by simply taking a photo of a document with your camera. While the process is too cumbersome to have much application around a busy law office it might be just what the busy freelance graphic designer needs to fulfill their minimal document scanning requirements. Scanning documents can be a pain but it’s often necessary. Until now, unless your operation required dozens of scans every day, purchasing a desktop scanner made little financial sense. With ScannerPro, you can transform your smartphone into a mobile scanner that will produce the hi-res copies and occasional PDFs you need to keep your business on track, And all for a scant $4. It’s the kind of common sense productivity app that gives developers a good name and helps talented, ambitious professionals obtain a competitive edge.

16. My Price

Graphic Design On Mac

You can have a state-of-the-art standing desk but if you don’t know how to price your work you’ll likely find yourself overwhelmed and residing squarely behind the financial 8-ball shortly after you hang out your shingle. My Price helps you figure out the right price to charge for your services so you don’t wind up shooting yourself in the foot by charging too much or too little. My Price bases its estimates on a variety of variables including hourly rate, years of experience, the type of job, the type of client, overhead costs and what the market is charging for similar work. When it’s finished you have a price you can be confident in.

17. Invoice

Invoice is another accounting aid that helps you create professional looking invoices, accept payments via credit cards and track whether a particular bill has been sent, paid or even viewed. These are the kind of tasks that can really chew up time and take a bite out of productivity. But when you download Invoice to your Android or iOS handset you are signaling the end of the line for the endless paper chase. You’ll know exactly where you stand in relation to each transaction and customer at any given time.

18. Adobe Preview CC

Often times when creating designs in Photoshop it’s difficult to determine exactly what they’re going to look like when they’re actually in place. With Preview CC you get to see your Photoshop creations in real time on the devices they’ll eventually be viewed with. This helps you identify and rectify problems before you send the design off to the client, eliminating the tedious and time-consuming (and reputation-damaging) process of waiting for client feedback, making revisions, resubmitting, waiting, making more revisions and so on ad nauseum. It’s one of those productivity-centric design apps that can totally change the way you interact with your clients. Unfortunately, though, like a lot of apps for graphic design, it’s only available for iOS. So, nothing is perfect.

19. Behance

Behance is another Adobe product. This time the software behemoth is addressing the need for designers and aspiring designers to get feedback on their work, derive inspiration from the work of others and network with other designers and potential customers. Behance is intended to be a talent showcase, a place to develop online portfolios and a way for schools, businesses and other organizations to disseminate creative work. But Behance is not just for graphic designers, although you’ll find quite a few of them there. The service also targets fashion designers, engineers, costume designers, cartoonists, filmmakers, graffiti artists and many, many more. If you feel like things are stagnating for you Behance can help.

20. Dribbble

Dribbble, like Behance, is not in the running for best graphic design software. Instead, it’s intended as a kind of feedback loop where users post a snippet of what they’re working on and encourage input. There’s nothing new or groundbreaking about Dribbble. They’ve basically been able to thrive because, well, good designers are always looking for constructive criticism and Dribbble is a pretty reliable place to get it. When you visit Dribbble you’ll notice they replace familiar business terms with basketball slang (a new image is a “shot” a retweet is called a “rebound” a popular project has reached “the playoffs” etc). Yet as silly as that is, it’s not enough to detract from fundamental truth that if you crave the kind of feedback that can actually help, you stand a good chance of finding it on Dribbble.