Artisan Creative is celebrating 20+ years in staffing and recruitment of creative professionals. Over the years we have learned a thing or two that we’d like to share with you. We hope you enjoy the 412th issue of our weekly a.blog.

Most designers try out dozens of apps before they find the ones that best suit their work habits and enhance their creativity. When love takes root between a designer and an app, it’s the beginning of a long, fruitful, and sometimes passionate relationship.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we like to share fourteen design-related apps that we can’t live without (and wouldn’t want to).

AutoDesk Sketchbook

One of the most versatile and popular drawing apps, Sketchbook includes a collection of tools that would cost hundreds in the three dimensional world!

Behance

Adobe’s portfolio showcase has become an important hub for the design community and one of the first places to spot UI trends.

Pixelmator

Pixelmator is basically a scaled-down version of Photoshop and is one of the most robust and useful free design apps around.

Pages

This simple and stylish word processing app is designed by Apple and comes with fancy templates and features. Despite significant changes between versions, Pages retains its passionate following.

Canva

Canva has become enormously popular as a means for marketing mavens and other non-designers to create eye-catching collateral of their own. With some practice, only a pro will know the difference.

Phonto

Even if you’re not a visual artist, Phonto can hone your creativity by adding cool captions to photos on the fly.

Coolors

Whether you’re new to color theory or your cat is named Pantone, this simple mix-and-match palette generator provides a quick shot of inspiration for design and branding projects.

UX Companion

This educational app provides enough definitions, examples, and in-depth resources to make anyone conversant in User Experience ideas, with a fittingly inviting and intuitive interface.

Glitch Lab

If you want to digitally garble, mangle, or otherwise mess up your photos, this is one of the most powerful toolkits for that. Join the pop art vanguard, use it for inspiration, or just have some fun between projects.

Pixite Complete

For a scant eight bucks, this suite packs six popular photo-editing apps and plenty of stylish effects to facilitate counter-intuitive combinations.

Font Candy

This fashionable photo-editing app is built for quick captioning and creates assets that are ready to travel on social media.

Marvel App

Marvel is a soup-to-nuts Swiss Army knife for designing mobile apps on mobile devices.

Exify

When your iPhone photography habit is more than just a hobby, Exify has a full set of features to help you manifest your visions.

Coffitivity

While not functionally a design app, Coffitivity’s portable coffee-shop ambiance will perk up your inner creative, even when you’re stuck in the office.