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Best Mac Apps For Designers 2018

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About the author:This guest article was written by Emma Best from Laptopical - a guide to the latest laptop reviews and laptop related news. You can also follow her on Twitter.

The Apple Design Awards show the ingenuity and expertise app developers can employ in their creations. Some give us emotional responses, some provide fun, and some, like Triton Sponge, can save lives. Best Presentation and Slideshow Software for the Mac. In this list of Mac presentation software, you'll find overviews for various types of tools. I've divided the list into two sections: Mac Slideshow Software Options (productivity office). These slideshow software packages are part of a large office productivity package. To succeed in the field of mobile UX design, designers must have the foresight and prepare for new challenges around the corner. To simplify the task, I've listed the biggest, impactful trends for 2018 and, most likely, beyond. User Journey Simplification. When we interact with apps or websites, we have a particular goal.

I've been using my MacBook Pro since a while now and I must say: I really love it. The most common app(s) that designers use has to be Adobe Photoshop (Or the full suite). The app(s) are great, but there is a downside: The price tag. Photoshop CS4 costs $699, CS4 extended is $999 and the full Creative Suite starts at an stunning $1799. For many people this is just a little bit too much to 'play around with'.

Luckily, there are also many free applications out there that can do the same kind of job that Photoshop could do for you. This article rounds up the best 15 free Mac Programs for Graphic Designers. Some of these applications can even do stuff that can't be achieved using Photoshop, or are much more simple to use.

Keep your wallet in your pocket, since all these programs will cost you nothing.

GIMP

The most popular of all free photo editing software, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and is highly-supported and frequently updated. Comparative to Photoshop, users can perform basic tasks such as photo retouching, color correction, and image size, or more complicated tasks like image composition and creation. GIMP has a scripting interface for advance users, as well as plugins, extensions, and filters.

Seashore

If you want GIMP, but don't have X11, then Seashore is the appropriate software for you. Based on GIMP, it has nearly all the settings and functions of the more advanced program without the higher requirements.

Inkspace

An excellent alternative to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw, Inkscape is a free vector graphics program supporting standard SVG format, as well as XML and CSS standards. This program can do everything you'll need in a vector graphics program - tracing, path operations, direct XML editing, etc. Import and export formats include all the common image types, including JPEG, PNG, and TIFF.

Front End Digital Media Workshop

Don't waste time manually resizing individual photos for your various projects. Front End Digital Media is a batch conversion app for images (as well as video and audio), and allows you to mass resize, resample, split, join, and up/down sample JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, PSD, and PICT image files.

Image Tricks

The biggest appeal for the Image Tricks app is the ability to apply dozens of different filters to over 20 different image formats. The finished photos can then be exported as either TIFF, JPEG, or PNG.

Comipro Plus

If you create cartoons of any type, Comipro Plus is an excellent app. Designed in Japanese but usable to English speakers, this program helps create modern-looking comics, including editing and adding word bubbles.

Google SketchUp

Different from a normal vector graphics program, Google's SketchUp allows you to not only create a design, but view it in 3D. It is easier to use than more complicated 3D software, such as AutoCAD, and is free.

Colorate

Colorate is used to change and manipulate the colors in a photo. The Library generates a color swatch based on the photo, then allow you to add a new color pallete, either blending the current one, creating a custom one, or randomizing a completely new pallete.

Goldberg

This program is best used for those times when you're viewing your photos, and notice that a color is slightly off, or a side needs cropped a bit more. Instead of firing up a full photo editing application, you can simply make minor adjustments, including color correction, blurs, noise, and embossing.

NIH Image

If you need to animate one of your photos or designs, this program is for you. It's compatible with a wide array of programs, and in addition to animating images, it can also perform minor tweaks to contrast, sharpening, smoothing, filters, and more. It also analyzes particles, angles, and paths.

Scratch

This program is so simple, it can be used also immediately with no prior instruction. It is used for creating small games, interactive art, and animated stories, and is primarily marketed to children. Despite it's juvenile market, it is an excellent tool for putting together quick interactive banners and images without the learning curve.

DAZ Studio

If you're in need of realistic 3D models, DAZ Studio is an easy-to-learn 3D program for creating 3D objects, including people, animals, and objects (buildings, cars, etc). DAZ Studio is easier to use than other 3D animation tools, and is perfect for creating surrealistic and 3D art.

Best Mac Apps For Designers 2018 Models

Bryce

Built to run with the aforementioned DAZ Studio software, Bryce is used to create real-looking landscapes using photos of real landscapes. Take a picture of your yard, a forest, some mountains, or other landscapes, import it into Bryce, and then add all the elements needed to turn it into a new world.

ArchiCAD

If you need a 3D design tool with more power and features than Google SketchUp, ArchiCAD is the right program to you. Similar to AutoCAD in both function and name, this program allows users to design their sketches and ideas into a realistic 3D render.

JAlbum

Every graphic designer requires an efficient way to keep all their photos and images organized. JAlbum is the ultimate photo organizer, as it not only allows you to organize your photos and folders using simple drag-and-drop functionality, but it also creates thumbnails and HTML pages of your photos for easy online publishing. The HTML pages to publish can be made to either export a gallery or a slide show. In addition, there's support for IPTC and EXIF data, lossless editing, image filters, style sheets, and an integrated FTP client.

Bonus: Pixelmator

I've added Pixelmator myself to this list, as Emma didn't include this app to her top 15 list. I really love to use Pixelmator myself and I don't think it should be missing from this amazing list.

Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images.

Bonus: Blender

Just like Pixelmator, I've added Blender myself to this list, as Emma didn't include this app to her top 15 list. Blender is a great open source app for 3d content.

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Are there more Mac Apps that you, as a graphic designer, love to use that is missing from the list above? Please share!

This guest article was provided to you by Emma Best from Laptopical.


Tags: guest articlemacappsgraphic designtoolsfree

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Material Design, a full platform design language, provides standards for designers to create websites and apps with a consistent look and feel. From the overall interface to the tiny details, Google proved it's digital perfection. Icons play a big role in Material Design. Material Design turns icons into meaningful signs that are the shortcuts that replace 1- 4 words. I'd like to share the 10 best free material design icon resources for your inspiration. Just pick the right ones and integrate them into your design.

1. Google Material Design Icons - Google Material Icons

Format: PNG, SVG

Price: Free

Usage pattern: Web, Android, and iOS projects

What's special:

  • 900+ icons all from a single, small file.
  • Served from Google Web Font servers or can be self-hosted.
  • Supported by all modern web browsers.
  • Colored, sized and positioned entirely with CSS.
  • Vector-based, looks great at any scale, retina displays, low-dpi display screens.

Google Material Design Icons provide over 900 excellent icons. They are available in a variety of sizes and densities and as a web font. Material icons are beautifully crafted, delightful, and easy to use in your web, Android, and iOS projects.

2. Material Icons from Icons8 - Material Design Social Icons

Format: PNG, SVG (in any format)

Price: Mostly free (some features of the icons are paid)

Usage pattern: Apps for the Web, Mac, and Windows

What's special:

  • Compare Material Icons With Other Styles.
  • Single Style, all icons are done by one designer so your user interface will look consistent.
  • Editable Vectors, vector icons are not merged and have preserved shapes. (paid)
  • Fonts Generator, pick only the icons you need and build your own, small font. (paid)
  • Icon Recoloring, pick a color and it will generate recolored versions of your PNG or SVG.
  • HTML Embedding, get a code to paste an icon right into your HTML.
  • Mac & Win Apps, allows you to search icons quickly and works well with Photoshop.

You have access to 4,400 material design icons in any format, size and color in 20 seconds. There are social media icons like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and all kinds of arrows. It also has basic ones like phone, home, and settings. If you are up for something more unorthodox, this is the right place for you.

3. Material Design Icons

Format: PNG, SVG, XAML

Price: Free

Usage pattern: All systems

What's special:

  • Free updates.
  • Supports download separately, in single file.
  • Web font is available.
  • Vector drawable, including line icons and solid icons.
  • Supports open source.

This icon resource library is very rich and contains varied types with nearly 4000 free icon resources. This huge free resource platform is a collection of numerous UX/UI designers sharing their own design results. You can see the name of the icon and its designer when you hover over it.

4. Materialpalette

Format: PNG, SVG

Mac

Price: Free

Usage pattern: iOS & Android

What's special:

  • 16 types, including the material design search icon, and material design menu icon.
  • Bulk download freely.
  • Vector icons, looks great at any scale and screen size.

This library provides typical free material design icons. The page provides a search box to quickly search icons making it, easier to find and get what you really need. It also offers a palette and color picker.

5. Materializecss

Format: PNG, SVG

Price: Free

Usage pattern: All system

What's special:

  • Usage - to be able to use these icons, you must include this line in the portion of your HTML code Download all at a time.
  • Sizes - to control the size of the icon, change the font-size: 30px property of your icon.

The site offers 932 Google material design icons in total. The icons can be used in prototype design for UX/UI designers and used directly by developers to develop apps.

6. Material Icons Design from Flaticon

Format: Vector icon (SVG & EPS), PNG, PSD and Iconfont

Price: Free

Usage pattern: All systems

What's special:

  • Support creating patterns with the icons directly.
  • Share freely.
  • Download all at one time.

This site offers a comprehensive arrey of Google material design icons. They are divided into 9 pages for better display. They are applicable to Google Material Design and Monochrome. You can select the icons to view more information and make operations like edit, share, or add to favorites.

7. Webalys

Format: .Sketch, .AI, .SVG, .PDF, .EPS, .Iconjar files.

Price: Free pack - 350 icons

Essential pack - $87 for 1650 icons

Ultimate pack - $127 for 40000 icons

Usage pattern: All system

What's special:

  • Various pack choices.
  • Google Material Design Guidelines.
  • Each icon was separately drawn in 2 versions, so you get a total of 8,000 icons.
  • The Nova icons are provided in all essential files used by developers and designers, including Sketch, Illustrator, SVG, PDF.

It says 'the World's Biggest Material Design Icons Pack', and touts itself as the only icons pack that include all icons in solid and line style, for designing applications and websites. It's legible and consistent. The Nova icons follow the Google Material Design Guidelines to ensure consistency, readability and clarity even at small sizes. You can import the 8,000 icons into the Iconjar application in one click.

8. Material UI

Format: SVG, PNG

Price: Free

Usage pattern: All system

What's special:

  • Search box to quickly find icons you need
  • Both line icons and sold icons

This icon library supports single download. Each icon has four modes: Black, grey, white, SVG. There is a variety of sizes you can choose from. All the icon information can be viewed in detail. You can also copy the SVG code.

9. Material Design Icon Template PSD

Format: PSD

Price: Free

Usage pattern: All system

What's special:

  • Personal use for designers.
  • Comes with matched UI kits.
  • Future updates.

It's an ultimate template of icons designed in Material style. It includes guideline grid, material shapes for the creation of an awesome icon. It also provides android screens so you and your customers could see the icons live and scaled in all resolutions.

10. Material Design Icons By Brad Williams

Format: SVG, PNG

Price: Free

Usage pattern: All systems

What's special:

  • Enables 1000+ Material Design icons within WordPress pages and posts.
  • Shortcode generator – includes an easy-to-use TinyMCE pop-up shortcode generator.

How to play mp4 on mac. These icons are is provided by designer Brad Williams; this resource contains more than 1000 Material Design icons that can be used on WordPress pages and blogs. In addition, icons can be inserted using shortcodes or HTML tags. The icon resource can be used in 3 different ways: shortcode, HTML and TinyMCE.

I have provided what I consider to be the 10 best material design icon resources from my side. Since most of them are free of charge, you can try one or all them out. We all know that icons affect user experience. So, how do you use them effectively? How do you integrate them into your projects? How so you ensure that the icons match with the overall Material Design interface?

You need to practice. Adobe premiere pro free trial download mac. Practice makes perfect. We all know that prototyping is of great importance. When you use the right prototyping tool, you can build an app with a good-looking interface and excellent interactions quickly and effortlessly. Here I take Mockplus as an example. I will show you how to quickly use those icons in design with this tool.

Powerful input icon resources in Mockplus

Mockplus comes with more than 300 components and over 2,000 vector icons itself. With a simple drag and drop, you can build interface design. In its properties panel, you can set icons for visibility, color, transparency, etc. You can also convert them into pictures for more applications with a single click.

Easily make use of the above material icons resources in Mockplus

You can also import all the above icon resources into the Mockplus component library. You can also share them with your team members to improve component reusability and reduce workload.

How to use the above icon resources in Mockplus? Here we go.

1) Create a component library

Open Mockplus and create a new project. Select the component library icon on the left panel, click '+' to create a new component library and name it as 'material design icons'. You can also add descriptions or change thumbnails.

2) Import material icons

Select the library 'material design icons', and click 'import image' on the drop-down menu of the '+' icon, or right-click on the library can also find the import image options. Then with one click, you can import the icons in Mockplus with a batch of 100 icons at a time. Mockplus currently supports PNG and JPE format icon resources.

3) Share you component library

Now you can see that the icons are already in your component library. How do you share these icon resources? Click the management button next to the '+' icon to enter the component library management interface. Here you can synchronize, edit, export, and delete the component. Click 'share to' then add the accounts of your team members in order to share it with them.


More free material design icons resources:

1. Material Design

This repository contains all the planning for current and work-in-progress Material Design Icons. It also contains converted icons from Google's official icon set. Not that SVG icons are not compressed in GitHub. You will need to manually edit the CSS file to remove the version query string.

Download here:https://github.com/Templarian/MaterialDesign

Best Mac Apps For Designers 2018 Pc

2. Material Design Blog

This is a free master set of beautiful Material Design icons by Jurre Houtkamp. It contains colorful, bold, well-crafted, Material Design style icons from Amsterdam based designer Jurre Houtkamp. It's available in .icns, .ico and .png file type.

Download here:http://materialdesignblog.com/free-master-set-of-m..

3. Material Design Powerpoint & Keynote icons

Powerpoint & Keynote is still used in the business world. To make things less miserable, this designer converted 425 material design icons into native ppt & key editable shapes! You can change scale and color freely.

Download here:https://dribbble.com/shots/1932096-Material-Design..

4. Material Design Icons

750 free open-source glyphs from Google.

Download here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/material-design-..

5. Material-design-icons

Best Mac Apps For Designers 2018 2019

Material design by Google. It includes all versions.

Download here: https://cdnjs.com/libraries/material-design-icons

6. Google Material Design icons

Apps For Architects

617 vector icons that you can freely add to your collections.

2018 Mac Pro

Download here: https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/google-materia..

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