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5 of the best art and design apps

With London Design Festival around the corner, it's time to get arty. Fixie bike optional

iDesign £2.99

Available for smaller iThings but best used on an iPad, this vector graphics app is great for designing all sorts, from technical diagrams to cartoons, icons, and all those Hed Kandi album covers. Because it’s vectored, edges will remain sharp regardless of how much scaling you do.

Get it for iPhone and iPad

Art of Glow £Free

You won’t end up with a masterpiece, but Art of Glow is an addictive little app. Select your brush and start painting colour-cycling psychedelia, fireworks and neon graffiti with your fingertips. If you’re feeling brave, it’s a great app to let the kids mess about with.

Get it for Android

Get it for iPhone and iPad

BlockArt HD £1.99

Not a serious 3D rendering app, but a quick, simple and elegant way of building up 3D objects from lots of square blocks. It’s just a matter of choosing your colour, rotating your object and ‘painting’ your blocks directly on to the screen. We built a spaceship.

Get it for iPad

Iro 69p

Let’s say you’re decorating a room or designing a corporate logo: feed Iro a photo containing colours which match the mood you’re after, and the app will pick out the tones in the photo, giving you codes to input into computer palettes or even paint mixers.

Get it for iPad

Animation Creator HD £1.49

If you can draw, this is a great way to sketch out simple but professional-looking animations. If, like most people, you can’t, then you could always cobble together epic stickman kung-fu action scenes for an adoring YouTube public.

Get it for iPad

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Profile image of Dan Grabham Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home