A Quick Look at Mac Only Design Apps
Ever wondered why mac computers are so popular among artists, especially graphic designers? The story goes way back to 1990 when the very first version of Photoshop was released exclusively for Macintosh computers. At that time nobody even suspected that this clever app from an unknown developer was going to become the industry standard. Even so, Photoshop 1.0 attracted many artists and designers who would later become one of the main Apple customer groups.
Fast-forward to the future the whole Adobe suite is no longer platform dependent as it supports OS X, Windows and even Chrome OS. Still, even though Windows has become a very capable platform for all kinds of designers, mainly due to its vast software selection, there are some interesting applications which are available only to Apple customers. Let’s take a quick look at them:
Affinity Designer
Embracing the power of fast vector processing Affinity Designer offers many features similar to those provided by Adobe Illustrator but at much greater speed and better responsiveness. The app is often updated with new features and ever expanding functionality roadmap. Though it might not be suitable for printing enthusiasts as Affinity Designer still doesn’t support bleeds, overprints and Pantone colors, a digital designer will find everything he needs in only a few clicks.
Grab Affinity Designer here!
Pixelmator
Probably the most popular application on this list. And not without a reason. Pixelmator is a powerful and beautifully designed, layer-based raster image editor and painting tool. Its interface shares some convenient similarities with Photoshop so all new users should feel right at home. Like its predecessor from Adobe the app lets you play with different options of layer styles, blending modes and masks. Oh, and it has build-in instagram-like effects as well.
Download Pixelmator right here.
Sketch
Already featured on our blog Sketch is an amazing tool for interface designers. The vector based app offers a great deal of features which support web and mobile design workflow such as masters, shared styles and artboards. Sketch is also very intuitive and user friendly so it’s a good starting point for novice UI and UX designers.
Get Sketch from here.
Glyphs
Typeface design was never an easy task. As an experienced designer I’d even say it’s one of the most demanding and sophisticated design processes in the modern art industry. All the different weights, styles, slants, renderings, ornaments and spacings need precise and often hand-made adjustments. Luckily, Glyphs lets you do all this tweaks painlessly and intuitively. What’s more the app covers many non-latin scripts and offers a handy plugin library.
Check out Glyphs here.
Concluding this list I’d also like to mention a little, but helpful lorem ipsum generator that makes use of your mac’s taskbar for amazing accessibility — LittleIpsum.
As you can see, even though Windows and OS X machines are on par with each other in terms of design applications, there are some developers dedicated to the Apple platform who would like to bring the mac’s designing glory back. Saying that, it’s good to keep in mind that all those apps have amazing Windows counterparts which shouldn’t be overlooked.
Hope you enjoyed this article. Feel free to share your thoughts with us!
