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Victor Riley

The Least Appreciated iPad Design App

Like many designers and people interested in design, I read Carrie Ruby’s review of the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil on The Verge (“A Designer’s Take on the iPad Pro”) with interest. Besides reviewing the two new Apple devices, she also described using Adobe Draw and Adobe Sketch, and found that they weren’t full-featured enough to support a sophisticated workflow. She says, “A lot of my design work takes place in Illustrator, and I was really hoping that the various apps would allow me the same flexibility as the desktop programs do.” And she ends her review with:

For designers specifically, there are definitely limitations around working with mobile creativity apps, not fully powered desktop versions. But I hope the apps will continue to improve and match the desktop experiences that I have now. I’m not there yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if one day I swapped my MacBook Pro for something like the iPad Pro.

The question this raised for me was, why are so many designers so locked into the Adobe application ecosystem that they’re unaware of better alternatives? In my view, the Autodesk Graphic app for iPad, iPhone, and Mac is a great Illustrator alternative, and the iOS versions are the most full-featured vector graphic applications on that platform. While there have been some good reviews of Graphic, such as this review on Medium by MacSources, I haven’t seen any reviews or examples that demonstrate the depth of the application. Even most of the examples on the Autodesk web site are kind of lame. I’m hoping to remedy that with this post.

Some Examples

First, a caveat. I’m not an artist. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I like vector graphics — they give you so much control over the image that you can make infinite adjustments until you’re completely happy with the whole result. So it’s with some trepidation that I show some of these pieces to an audience of design professionals and actual artists. But I do so primarily because I think they show off some of the deeper capabilities of the app: gradients, layers, the ability to support thousands of shapes even on an iOS device, full control over Bezier paths, great color control, Boolean shape operations, etc.

Moon Flowers
Vine City
Garden

All of these were done completely on the iPad, completely within the Graphic application, and from scratch, starting with a blank document and a single pen-drawn shape. Unlike some other vector graphic apps on iOS, Graphic has a fully-capable pen tool that allows you to either block out straight-edged shapes and pull out the Bezier handles later, or pull out the handles to create smooth curves as you go. You also have full control over the handles: symmetrical or asymmetrical adjustment, vertex type, etc.

One final example, done from a photograph after vacation and using Graphic in combination with the Procreate app on iPad, in order to introduce some limited textures into the scene. While the overall effect may betray its amateur origins, I do like the way Graphic’s gradients let me create (what I think, at least) is a fairly convincing sun glare.

Advanced Features

Most reviews and examples I’ve seen skim the surface of Graphic’s capabilities, so I thought I’d call out a few features that might convince someone like Carrie Ruby that it’s not only a viable Illustrator replacement, but it really could allow you to leave your laptop at home. I think the collection of these provide the desktop-class capabilities she was missing in the Adobe mobile apps:

  • Layers with blend modes and selection panes for objects and their constituent shapes and paths.
  • Linear, radial, and angle gradient fills with multiple colors and control points. Opacity can be set for any color selection; most of the emitted light effects (you can see I love them) use radial gradients with the light source color at the center at full opacity and the background color at the border at zero opacity.
  • Colors can be set using a color wheel, sliders for RGBA or HSBA, or Hex values, and an eyedropper tool can pick up any color in the composition. All values can also be set using keyboard entry.
  • Pencil and brush freehand tools with selective smoothing and, for the brush, a variety of line types.
  • Property inspectors allow keyboard entry for most shape properties, including position, size, and rotation, and aspect ratio can be locked or unlocked as you set one dimension.
  • A shear tool for perspective shape distortions.
  • Boolean shape operations, compound paths, the ability to open and close paths, and the ability to add and delete individual nodes.
  • Units can be set in pixels, inches, millimeters, and centimeters, and a scaling factor can be applied.
  • Selectable and adjustable grid spacing and snapping, and smart guides.
  • Outline mode.
  • Bitmap imports.

Graphic documents can be exported in native format for use with Graphic on the Mac or another iOS device, or as SVG, PDF, PNG (with transparency preserved if desired), PSD, or JPG. I can’t vouch for importing a Graphic export into Illustrator, but large Graphic SVG files open perfectly in Affinity Designer. Bitmap exports can be 72 or 300 dpi.

Finally

Graphic started life some years ago as iDraw, by Indeeo. Because I love my iPad and wanted to be able to do anything creative on it that I want to, anywhere I am, I adopted it early as my favorite vector graphics app. Last year, I noticed that it hadn’t been updated in many months and began to panic — I found that the prospect of not having it on my device significantly reduced the perceived value of having my iPad with me all the time. In fact, because I like the iPad/iDraw combination so much, I’ve spent the past two years trying to learn everything I can about graphic design. .

After several months of apparently languishing, iDraw was updated late last year as Graphic, and became available for iPhone as well. It is apparently now owned by Autodesk, and I hope they take good care of it. It’s stable, robust, versatile, and capable. It’s also very well designed — even a non-artist and amateur dabbler in graphic design and illustration can figure out how to get it to do almost anything he wants it to. If someone like me can make something like art with it, someone like you can surely use it for illustration, icon design, web design, print graphics… I’m sure your list is longer than mine.