Every designer loves illustrating on paper, brush, and pencil, but now, every designer has an iPad in hand equipped with fun drawing apps. Get fashion illustrations done on the go using portable devices. The real challenge is to find the right apps that will help you design like a pro. Here are three of the best apps that we believe will assist you with fashion illustration.

1. What Are The Best Fashion Apps
2. Best Fashion Design Apps For Ipad
3. Best Fashion Design Apps For Windows
4. Best Fashion Design Apps Free

1. Autodesk Sketchbook

Get ready to be fabulous with Star Fashion Designer App. All you need is a sense of style and an eye for detail. Kids can enjoy the tension, drama and inspiration of working with international celebrity designers, and learning designing secrets from the very best as they travel around the world, creating gorgeous outfits for clients in fashion. The app lets the young and beginners fashion designers who are new to the fashion designing field and want to learn about the stuff relating to the field so that they can polish up their skills and be on the top rated fashion designer in the near future.

This is one of the most preferred and realistic apps that is now available on app store for fashion illustration for iPad users. There are plenty of brushes and strokes available to choose from. There's a natural feel to the colors and the drawing. If you are using the same app on a different device, iPad app syncs with it and retrieves your fashion illustration in progress. This app is free to download but has several in-app purchases enabled.

2. Adobe Illustrator Draw

This sleek app has 4 set of the brush to choose from with no textures unless you create them yourself. Colors, opacity and tip size are adjustable. Adobe Illustrator Draw lets you create beautiful vector designs and sync them across Adobe Creative Cloud on desktop and mobile. the interface is modern and simple to use. Adobe is a dominating player in the world of design related apps and software. Whether you like to draw flat sketches or freehand fashion sketches, Adobe Illustrator Draw is a great tool for fashion illustration.

3. Paper by FiftyThree

Another one of our favorite apps for fashion illustration as well as taking notes is Paper by FiftyThree. This was, in fact, one of the first drawing apps with a pencil and is still a great option for fashion illustration. This free app can be used to write notes, and has auto-correction features incorporated. The paper by FiftyThree was crowned iPad App of the Year a few years back too. The app was later acquired by we transfer and the objective behind the paper was to help bring ideas to life with utmost simplicity. This app is great to sketch your ideas on the go and also get inspired by their templates too.

A bonus app recommendation for fashion sketching and to create illustrations are Adobe Photoshop Sketch app. Like the other apps, this too has a selection of brushes to choose from. All of the above apps are available on the iOS app store and are mostly free to use.

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.

What Are The Best Fashion Apps

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-Template

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.

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

Best Fashion Design Apps For Ipad

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.

Best Fashion Design Apps For Windows

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.

Best Fashion Design Apps Free

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