Did you know you can use your iPad or iPhone to help with interior design projects around your home? Here are ten of our favourite interior design apps.
1) Home Interior Ideas
Identified by Apple as a “New and Noteworthy” app, Home Interior Ideas allows you to collate inspirational pictures and group them according to the room in your house. High quality photos from top designers are used throughout the app and there is even a virtual walkthrough function, generating a panoramic view of their rooms.
2) 3Don Architecture
For design enthusiasts who use Google Sketchup to create 3D models of their designs, 3DOn uses GPS technology to show your design in situ. With a pre-loaded design, you can stand in your living room and see your finished project in place before you even begin work!
3) Remodelista
Gwyneth Paltrow famously claims Remodelista is her “obsession” thanks to its daily updates on architecture and tutorials. This online sourcebook provides new reference and inspiration materials every day.
4) Palettes
Colour is the key to successful interior design and the Palettes app allows you to collect palettes of colours for later use. You can select colours from photos, websites or mix your own, and the app then automatically creates the codes required for reproduction on your computer or even at the paint shop.
5) mColorWheel
mColorWheel helps you choose your colours based on the rules of harmony and tone and, like Palettes, creates the hex codes required for faithful reproduction elsewhere.
6) Houzz Interior Design Ideas
So impressed were CNN by Houzz, that they nicknamed it the “Wikipedia of interior and exterior design”, mainly because it accesses one of the largest online design databases in the world. This impressive app puts 500,000 inspirational design ideas at your fingertips.
7) AutoCAD WS
For serious 3D architectural modeling, AutoCAD is widely regarded as the package to use. AutoCAD WS allows you to view and edit models on your iPad whilst out and about – perfect for tweaking designs on site.
8) Penultimate
Touted as a note taking app, Penultimate has the added distinction of providing “graph paper” – perfect for on-site sketches. Photorealistic inks help maintain the look and feel of a “proper” sketch, and you can even use a stylus on your iPad for the ultimate artistic experience. Andy Vandervell, writing for Which.com, described Penultimate as “a very simple app to use … avoid[ing] the trap of including too many options for adding wacky shapes and diagrams.”
9) Pinterest
Not strictly an interior design app, but Pinterest features all manner of inspirational design images and photographs shared by other users. You can “pin” pictures on your boards and refer back to them when you are ready to get creative. Think of it as “social” interior design!
10) PhotoPad by ZAGG
When snapping your own inspirational photographs, it would help if you could edit the pictures too, which is where PhotoPad can help. Rotate, crop, resize and colour adjustment are among the tools included to help get the picture just right.
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