Many designers – both Mac and PC based – have been taken with Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch.

iPhone - iDeal for Creative Designers

There is no denying that there are many different applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. But how many of these are useful to those of us involved in the creative industry?

Below we feature four iPhone apps that may be of use to graphic designers and those in creative industries. Some looked to be useful organisational tools, others we thought might help inspire or motivate creativity, whilst others we have included simply because captured our imagination.

Whilst researching this, in many cases we found that there was more than one App which performed a similar function. We have simply listed the ones which appealed to us most. So it may be advisable, when at the iPhone App store, to do a search for similar Apps, as there may be one which is better suited for one purpose over another.

Anyway, in no particular order, here are four design Apps that we liked the look of from the iPhone App Store.

Palettes is an iPhone App for creating colour schemes. With Palettes, it is possible to sample colours from websites, iPhone photo album images or other colour schemes. It will import and export colour palettes to and from Adobe Photoshop and supports a number of colour modes, including RGB, HSV, HSL and CMYK.

There is also a Lite version of Palettes, which does not cost anything, but has some features removed (such as importing and exporting palettes from Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and other programs.

Another colour-based app, which functions by providing a swatch library and interactive colour wheel to help enable creatives to select, showcase and identify colours. Colour Expert includes various Pantone swatches, web safe and HTML colours. It is also possible to add custom colours and email Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) files.

PhotoWizard is a photo fixer. It can auto fix the under exposure photos taken from iPhone camera. A manual tool is also available to manually adjust brightness, contrast and color saturation. This App supports  five filters;

• oil paint effect
• fish-eye & anti-fish-eye effect
• sketch
• block waves
• monochrome

We know there are many more useful applications and new ones being created every day. We would love to hear from other designers regarding any other apps they think worth mentioning.