Jun 25, 2020 Best iMac for Graphic Designers iMore 2020 When it comes to graphic design, you want a powerful machine that would be able to handle anything you throw at it in terms of visuals. And graphic design is part of the creative community, which includes graphic design, along with other industries like music creation, writing, photo and video editing. May 17, 2017 Besides, The simplicity and ease of use in exporting and managing assets in Sketch make it an excellent fit for young/up-and-coming designers. Price: One-time licensing fees of US$99 which makes it much cheaper than any of its competitors. Works only on Mac OSX. Mainly, the Mac machine is used by the designers and that’s why we are going to list the top 10 best free MAC Apps for graphic designers. These apps are full of features and can help any designer to develop and create wonderful art. The tools are also used by hundreds of other graphic designers.
Businesses around the world are demanding higher productivity from their employees. The United States has reached all-time high labor productivity as we get 4 times more work done then our grand-parents in 1950.
As you may have guessed it, technology has contributed to most of our productivity. With softwares, information communication, data processing, and automated control, it has made us a smart and sophisticated workforce to our value-added enterprises.
we get 4 times more work done then our grand-parents in 1950. - United States Nonfarm Labour Productivity
But, with more than 4 million software, browser extensions, phone & tablet apps to choose from, it can get overwhelming. So how do you get to select, what makes your work more productive? Or if the tools that you are currently using are outdated? The truth is there’s always going to be something new to learn that will make our work much easier, faster, smarter, profitable. In short, better ROI (Return On Investment: I know you are a creative lot !).
Contrary to this, fashion designers are spending extra hours at work with many tasks without knowing about the solutions available to them. Skills that we learned in fashion design schools are outdated. I meet with many fashion designers, and on one such visit to a famous fashion company, the designers were Shocked to learn the advances that technology has made to speed up the work.
Therefore I decided to write this blog-post so that you'll get to use these fashion apps (web and phone-based) in case you are not using them already.
Pinterest likes to say 'It's about planning your future', but it's mostly where people go to find images of interesting stuff like recipes, holiday spots, apparel, shoes, handbags, just about anything.
For fashion companies and particularly fashion designers and product developers, it's a digital MOOD-BOARD. Beginning of every season, the inspirations are collected and transformed into multi-billion fashion products.
The best part of Pinterest is that you always find a good collection of images compared to google image search or Flickr. Why? Because in Pinterest, most images are curated and are put in collections by other users (humans) which is the most time-consuming tasks. You can also choose to keep your mood-boards private if you wish to do so.
Price: Pinterest is FREE to use for the most part with few exceptions such as creating ads. Works best on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari web browsers.
Sketch
Adobe Illustrator has dominated the world of creative software for decades with so many features BUT only until 5 years ago when Sketch was launched. If you haven't heard about it, then don't feel bad because you are not the only fashion designer who hasn't heard about it:)! As we speak, there's a war going on the internet between Illustrator Vs Sketch App fans on claiming superiority.
In a nutshell, Sketch has almost overtaken adobe illustrator in the graphic design world. Why? because Sketch is fast, intuitive and has lots of Plugins. There's so much development by third-party developers who continue to create some really smart plugins and keep extending the functionality of Sketch.
Besides, The simplicity and ease of use in exporting and managing assets in Sketch make it an excellent fit for young/up-and-coming designers.
Price: One-time licensing fees of US$99 which makes it much cheaper than any of its competitors. Works only on Mac OSX.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe’s dominance has been such that it became impossible to work as a designer without using something from Creative Suite. Fashion designers, technical designers, etc use Illustrator to drawing flat sketches (or functional sketches) with callouts for construction and styling details to put them in tech packs so your team and manufacturer can easily understand and follow.
If you are new to illustrator then there are some great resources available. You can join free webinars and training classes from Fashion Classroom or Sew Heidi. If you choose NOT to learn functional sketches, then other options are taking lots of photos to put them together. I made this quick attempt to create a tech pack specifications without using illustrator in less than 5 minutes.
Price: Free 1-month trial and thereafter US$29.99/mo. Works best on Mac OSX and Windows 10 and above.
Slack
Slack is a communication platform that allows team members to work in organized groups or easily searchable one-on-one conversation threads. Slack is widely adopted by small and large teams alike. Unlike those boring and ugly softwares, slack brings a fresh approach to sharing files and communicating over it.
“Communication is one of the things that cause tension in an organization, and we wanted to relax that,” Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack said on Beta Creative.
What makes Slack powerful for fashion designers?
It's integration with thousands of tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, and over 1,000 other applications and access almost everything from one platform. Companies like Urban Outfitters, Mark & Spencer are benefiting from Slack and being able to make decisions quickly.
Price: Slack is free to use until 5GB space and thereafter US$8 /mo. Works best on chrome, firefox and safari browser.
Techpacker
Tech packs (or specification sheets) were the most time-consuming tasks and every fashion designer will tell you the endless frustrations of creating flat sketches, condensed wordings to fit in a format, amendments and repeateds innovative system of matching, communicating and identifying colors has made it easier for designers to work together with manufacturers. But, as most work is now digital, how would you quickly find the correct Pantone color for the inspirational images you found on Pinterest and Instagram without importing into Photoshop (super time consuming)?
If you are a Google Chrome or Firefox user then this simple extension with Color Picker and Eye Dropper will assist you in finding color reading as RGB. You can then use Pantone's Color Finder to translate into nearest Pantone number. You can also use Pantone color App for i-phones and Andorid based phones where once a photo is chosen the Pantone Color App exports color values directly.
Price: Both Colorzilla Eye Dropper and Pantone Color Finder are FREE to use. They work best on Chrome, Firefox and smartphone.
Shopify
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows you to easily set up an online store and start selling. It lets you customize your storefront, accept credit card payments, track and respond to orders — all with a few clicks. It powers over 350,000 businesses and over 1,000 Enterprise Plus customers.
What makes Shopify great for fashion companies?
Although, not confirmed but I wouldn't be surprised if more than 30% of fashion brands in North America and Canada are running their e-commerce stores on Shopify. It's simple, clean, easy to use and integrates easily with other platforms like Amazon, Facebook so you can do everything from one place.
Price: 7 Days free trial, thereafter US$29 per month.
Makers Row
Finding a manufacturer specific to your product categories is hard. And finding a good one is even harder. You can start by asking around for references however it could be time-consuming. So if you are specifically looking for a manufacturer in the USA with crowd-sourced reviews then Makers Row could be useful. They have a fairly decent list of about 3,900 apparel and accessories related makers that are clearly sorted by categories and rating.
But then, many products still can't be produced locally in the USA and what if you are looking for lower manufacturing costs and a greater number of manufacturers to choose from then Global sources is a good resource as they put a lot of effort into listing factories that meet higher standards compared to its direct competitor Alibaba (another listing website).
BrandBoom
Brandboom is a wholesale e-commerce platform to create clean Line sheets, get orders directly from retailers & receive payments in simple steps. After setting up your line sheet, you can directly send a link to your buyers and showrooms so they can book directly and can also pay. This will avoid so many back-&-forth communication and missing critical SKU/sizes etc.
If you are making line-sheets manually using Adobe InDesign and adding it on Excel docs then you know know the pain I'm talking about and how hard it is to keep it up-to-date.
Besides, the customer service at BrandBoom is really helpful as they are always available on the phone so setup is pretty fast.
Price: Free with limits and thereafter US$79/mo. Works best on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari web browsers.
CLO-3D
If you are looking for a futuristic pattern making software, or a way to visualize your sketches in 3D so you can eliminate at least one sample, then you can check out CLO 3D .
It begins by picking up a 3D body – avatar or dress form, available in different shapes and sizes. Then either import your own patterns or draw them from scratch directly in CLO. Finally, pair each seam of the garment, and select fabric to see them all coming together in 3D. You can then fine-tune your designs in real-time and adjust the pattern.
Price: FREE 1-month trial and thereafter US$99/mo. Works best on OSX and Windows 10 and over.
Business of Fashion
Fashion is a business after all, and Business of Fashion has become an essential publication in the fashion industry to keep up with fashion news, shows, and trends for women's and men's fashion. It's directly competing with Women's Wear Daily.
Business of fashion has become the Netflix of publication with interesting and in-depth content that's receiving great reviews within the fashion community.
Zapier & Workflow
With all these apps, the new challenge is moving data around and communicating between then so we found that the best way to do it is, Zapier (for web) and Workflow (for i-phones).
It connects more than 750 web apps for you so you can create workflows and automate tasks in the background and you can focus on more important work. There are thousands of pre-available workflows such as resizing images and adding to Dropbox automatically.
Bonus app: Xero
And finally, accounting software that you may as a fashion designer need if you owner of your own fashion brand. Xero is a cloud-based software company that develops cloud-based accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses.
QuickBooks has dominated the accounting software market for years however Xero is rapidly expanding in cloud accounting software. Xero now serves over 1 million businesses in more than 100 countries. The company claims it provides “Beautiful Accounting,” focusing on ease of use, solid functionality, and an ambitious development schedule – product updates come out every 3-6 weeks.
I hope that by using these tools, you'll get through your work faster and go home early to spend quality time with your family, pets and loved ones. Any apps and tools that I missed?! Let me know in the comments section below.
Other related articles on techpacker that you may be interested in:
BestiMac for Graphic DesignersiMore2020
When it comes to graphic design, you want a powerful machine that would be able to handle anything you throw at it in terms of visuals. And graphic design is part of the creative community, which includes graphic design, along with other industries like music creation, writing, photo and video editing, and so much more. Macs are the computers of choice for the creative community, and we think the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K Display is the best option for serious graphic designers. That's because you get the best possible screen, great specs, and all for a reasonable price.
Free Video Apps For Mac
Best Overall: 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina Display
If you're looking for an iMac for graphic design, then you're going to want one with a stunning display to see all of your graphical work. With this iMac, you get a huge 27-inch Retina 5K display, which supports 500 nits of brightness and has a substantial 5120-by-2880 screen resolution with support for one billion colors and wide color. You also get high graphics with a Radeon Pro 570X 4GB video card for the base model, 575X 4GB for the middle tier, and 580X with 8GB for the high-end model. The high-end model is also configurable to Radeon Pro Vega 48 with 8GB of memory if you need it.
The 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina Display has a 3.0GHz 6-core Intel i5 processor with Turbo Boost up to 4.1GHz, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB Fusion Drive. If the base stats aren't enough for you, the machine can always be configured for more memory or storage (including SSD), but the middle and high-end offerings offer more power and can also be configured.
Even though the iMac was last updated in March 2019, it's still a very capable machine that is perfect for graphic design work and more.
Pros:
- Large 27-inch Retina 5K Display
- Three base models to choose from
- Reasonably priced for what you get
Cons:
- Different configurations can be pricey
- Only starts with 8GB of RAM
- New model could be coming very soon
Best Overall
27-inch iMac with 5K Retina Display
Get the most bang for your buck
The 27-inch iMac comes with a gorgeous 5K Retina display and has three base models that are configurable for your needs.
Best Entry Level: 21.5-inch iMac with 4K Retina Display
The iMac with 4K Retina display is less money than the 27-inch, and the 4K display should be good enough for a lot of graphic design work. However, you will need to keep in mind that the 4K Retina display is only available in the 21.5-inch size, which is slightly disappointing. Still, the 4K display has a nice 4096-by-2304 resolution with support for one billion colors, and it also has 500 nits of brightness and wide color.
The base model for the 4K iMac starts with a 3.6GHz quad-core Intel i3 processor that's configurable to 3.6GHz 6-core Intel Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz. You also start with 8GB of RAM (configurable up to 16GB or 32GB), 1TB hard drive (configurable to 1TB Fusion Drive or 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB SSD), and Radeon Pro 555X with 2GB memory. You can get the higher level 4K iMac if you need a boost in processor power or video card.
Pros:
- Affordable price
- Beautiful 4k Retina display
- Less than the 5K iMac
- Two base choices that can be configured
Best Mac Os Apps
Cons:
- Only comes in 21.5-inch size
- Starts with only 8GB of RAM
- New model could be coming soon
Best Entry Level
21.5-inch iMac with 4K Retina Display
A great middle ground
The 4K Retina Display still looks fantastic and is highly affordable. It doesn't come in a 27-inch size, though.
Source: iMore
If you're on a budget and just need an iMac for the basics, then the Non-Retina 21.5-inch iMac is a good option to consider. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a 4K or 5K Retina Display, but it has a decent 1920-by-1080 resolution, which should suffice for basic graphic design.
On the inside, the Non-Retina 21.5-inch iMac has a 2.3GHz dual-core 7th-generation Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz. It starts with 8GB of RAM that you can configure up to 16GB, a 1TB hard drive that can be configured to a 1TB Fusion Drive or 256GB SSD, and Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640.
Pros:
- The least expensive iMac
- Good for basic graphic design
Cons:
- Hasn't been updated since 2017
- No 4K or 5K Retina Display
Best Value
21.5-inch iMac (Non-Retina)
The most affordable option
Best Mac Apps For Designers 2018
This is the cheapest iMac, but its 21.5-inch display is Non-Retina. But it should still be enough for basic graphic design.
Source: Craig A. Hunter
If the 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina Display doesn't offer enough power for you, then you may want to consider the beastly iMac Pro. That is if you can afford it — this thing isn't cheap!
With the iMac Pro, you get a 27-inch 5K Retina Display, but it has an 8-core 3.2GHz Intel Zeon W processor with Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz with a 19MB cache. You can configure it up to 18-cores if you really need it, but that's going to cost you a pretty penny. It also starts with Radeon Pro Vega 56 graphics card with 8GB memory that you can also configure up to Radeon Vega 64X with 16GB of memory. The base RAM in the iMac Pro is 32GB, but you can go all the way to 256GB RAM if you want to. And it comes with a 1TB SSD, configurable up to 4TB.
It may be more than what most people need, but if you need a serious machine to handle tons of rendering and other graphic-intensive tasks, the iMac Pro will do nicely.
Pros:
- Packs in a ton of power
- 27-inch 5K Retina Display
- Comes in Space Gray color
Best Mac Apps For Designers Free
Cons:
- Very expensive
- Not for most people
- Hasn't been updated since 2017
Best Power
iMac Pro
More power!
Mac App Store For Pc
The iMac Pro has enough power to handle pretty much anything. And it's the only iMac to come in Space Gray. But it'll cost you.
Source: Rene Ritchie / iMore
For those who need a Mac for graphic design, but want it to be portable, then we recommend taking a look at the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The 16-inch display has 3072-by-1920 native resolution at 226 pixels per inch with support for millions of colors, 500 nits of brightness, wide color and True Tone, making it perfect for graphic design.
Not only does the display look great, but you get power too. The base model 16-inch MacBook Pro gives you a 2.6GHz 6-core Intel Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz, and you can even upgrade it to 8-cores with a more powerful processor if need be. It also starts with a 512GB SSD that can go all the way up to 8TB, 16GB of RAM that's configurable up to 64GB, and you get AMD Radeon Pro 5300M 4GB graphics card that can also be upgraded if desired.
If you want a serious portable machine for graphic design, the 16-inch MacBook Pro is the one to look into.
Pros:
- Portable power
- 16-inch display is gorgeous
- Configurable to suit your needs
Best Portability
16-inch MacBook Pro
Portable power
It's no iMac, but the 16-inch MacBook Pro packs in a ton of power with a gorgeous display, and you can take it anywhere.
Bottom line
The 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina Display is the best iMac for graphic designers. With the large 27-inch screen and stunning 5K Retina display that it's capable of, you're getting the most capable machine for graphic design work at a reasonable price. Plus, it has three base configurations for you to customize if need be, so you can create the 5K iMac of your dreams.
And while we seem to be due for a refreshed iMac lineup, the 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina Display was only released in March 2019, so it's still a very powerful machine. Even if you buy it now, it should run flawlessly.
Credits — The team that worked on this guide
Christine Romero-Chan has been using Macs for a little over a decade now. She has a strong understanding of what each Mac is capable of and their purpose and can give anyone a good recommendation. You can find her and various musings on Twitter, or check out her photography on Instagram.
Rene Ritchie Rene Ritchie has been covering the personal technology industry for a decade. An outspoken analyst and critic, he writes at iMore.com/vector, podcasts at applepodcasts.com/vector, and you can find his show at youtube.com/vector. Follow him @reneritchie on Twitter and Instagram.
Best Mac Apps For Designers 2017
We may earn a commission for purchases using our links. Learn more.
Kinda like this but betterBest Mac Apps For Fashion Design
Don't like Apple's Magic Keyboard? Try these alternatives
Do you like the look of Apples Magic Keyboard but want something a little different? There are alternatives.