Hasta La Ideas

Images: Top – Susan Murtaugh, Bottom – Andrew Meehan

There’s an app for that: finding a taco stand, playing Frere Jacques on the pan flute, figuring how much to tip, making fart sounds… As the iPhone App Store climbs towards the 100,000 offering mark, we occasionally sigh and wonder when something genuinely useful to professional designers will appear. As of 9am EST tomorrow morning, that may finally be answered, with Autodesk’s release of Sketchboook Mobile, the handheld counterpart to their “worth buying a Wacom for it” Sketchbook Pro design sketching software. The interface for SB Mobile is more than a little reminiscent of its bigger, older counterpart, featuring a simplified marking menu for tool selection, and a similar set of icons and workflows.

A quick browse through the App Store turns up plenty of drawing utilities, so there’s nothing momentous about adding one more. The most famous so far is Brushes, which gained notoriety in June when Jorge Colombo used it to create a cover for the New Yorker, spurring its sales, and spawning an evocative series of short videos depicting the stroke-by-stroke construction of various NYC scenes on Jorge’s touchscreen.

Compelling as they are, though, these videos highlight one of Brushes’ (and pretty much every other drawings app’s) main shortcomings as a serious design tool: poor layer control. Each image is constructed in a rigorous back-to-front order, and while that’s fine and familiar to artists used to acrylics and oil paints, it’s excruciating for the Photoshop and Corel proficient. The latest Brushes release does offer layers — four of them — but the interface is clunky and childish, and few users seem to employ them. While still limited, SB Mobile offers six layers which can be re-ordered with an elegant Photoshop-meets-Apple kind of interface, as well as some other features familiar to design professionals: customizable brushes, sample-based color selection, multiple undos, and sketch symmetry.

Image: Rae Morris — Seriously, you did that on an iPhone?

Image: Sidney Cheang

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