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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.
Technology has contributed to most of our productivity. With software, information communication, data processing, and automated control, it has made us a smart and sophisticated workforce to our value-added enterprises.
But, with more than 4 million software, browser extensions, phone & tablet apps to choose from, it can get overwhelming. In this blog post we will suggest 15 apps that will make your work much easier, faster, smarter and profitable. In short, better ROI (Return on Investment).
These apps are divided into 5 categories that will walk you through all stages of building a product. These stages include sources for fashion inspiration, applications used for product design, product development apps, manufacturing and marketing. So this is basically the A-Z guide for your entire product development process.
Fashion Inspiration
What is the very first step of the product design? It is getting inspired by something! It doesn't necessarily have to be a piece of clothing, it could be a mood board, movie or a piece of art. Here is a list of our suggested sources to get inspiration from.
WGSN
WGSN is a trend forecasting platform. It constantly monitors how consumers think, feel and behave. Their experts help brands stay relevant by predicting the products, experiences and services people will need in future. WGSN's network of industry experts, provides inspiration to a community of over 43,000 product designers and thought leaders in 32 global markets.
Price: Free registration
Art Authority
Art will always be a biggest source of inspiration in the fashion world. The Art Authority app lets you browse over 100,000+ paintings and sculptures by 1,500 of the Western world’s leading artists from ancient times to today. Their visual library is easy to access and use for every designer.
Price: $4.99
Vogue Runway
Take inspiration from other designers' collections! Vogue Runway is an app created by the world's leading fashion publisher. And it offers unlimited access to the world’s latest collections. Their archive contains over 1 million runway images from over 12,000 fashion shows including the new ones and old from way back to 2000s.
Price: Free
Other apps for fashion inspiration: Pinterest, Business of Fashion, Instagram, The Hunt.
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Design
Fashion design includes sketching an initial idea and technical specifications. The old-school method of sketching on the paper is outdated. These apps will help you sketch your designs fast and customize them on the go.
Adobe Illustrator
Fashion and technical designers use Illustrator to draw 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.
Price: $29.99/month
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.
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 fee $99.
Pret-A-TemplateGraphic Design Apps Free
Pret-A-Template is your digital sketchbook. It allows you to sketch your designs on iPhone or iPad. They offer over 500 templates to choose from, including bodies and details like shoes. Select from predefined skin, hair and makeup color pallets for a quick success.
Price: Starts at $5.99
Other apps for fashion design to consider: Sketchbook, Corel Draw.
Product Development
Product development includes the following stages: design, planning and developing salable products. It involves processes of getting your fashion products ready to manufacture.
Techpacker![]()
Tech packs (or specification sheets) used to be 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 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).
Price: Starts at $35/month
Swatchon
Swatchon is a wholesale fabric platform based in Seoul, South Korea. It ships to 52 countries and has 100000 fabrics to choose from online. This platform works with brands of all sizes allowing them to place an order as small as 3 yards, or up to 500,000 yards.
Price: Free for ready-to-wear businesses, $500 prepayment for everyone else.
Higg Co
Higg Co is a technology company that focuses on building tools that power sustainability measurement. Higg Co helps brands reduce energy use, combat audit fatigue, and safeguard those who work in the supply chain. Higg Materials Sustainability Indexallows designers to create custom materials, and understand their environmental impact.
Design App On Macbook Air
Marketing
When the product is manufactured it's time to sell it! Using the following apps you will be able to build a website, create line sheets and market your business.
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.
Price: 7 Days free trial, thereafter US$29 per month
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.
Price: Free with limits and thereafter US$79/mo.
Garmentory
Garmentory is one of the top online marketplaces existing right now. It is an ultimate source of indie boutiques, emerging and contemporary designers. By setting up a store on their online platform Garmentory gives brands access to thousands of customers around the globe.
Boutiques and brands can submit their application on Garmentory website and start selling after it's approved.
Other marketing apps to consider: Afterpay, Like to know it, Faire.
Also read
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.
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.
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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. How to uninstall locked apps mac.
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.
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. Ipad file transfer app.
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. https://cbwnwbg.weebly.com/blog/citrix-apps-will-not-open-on-mac.
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