App review: IsoSketch for iPad

Worth mentioning first off that I am in no way artistic so when I first saw this I wondered, ‘what’s the point’? I do love isometric drawings and all sorts of 3D so was intrigued but not quite sure what I’d actually use it for. As most techie type people though, I have boxes and drawers full of stuff that I just had to have, but never really knew why. I mentioned it to a friend who very kindly gifted it to me, so I felt compelled to have a play.

Before I knew what was happening, I had been sucked into some sort of time-lapsed world where seconds became minutes and I had lost a full hour without really knowing where it went! I found IsoSketch to be highly addictive and a great time killer, producing random isometric shapes and objects that really didn’t seem to have any point or purpose, but yet kept me entertained for way too long! I’m sure that in the hands of somebody with actual artistic talent, this app would allow them to produce some fantastic images.

The interface is very simple to use with a set of drawing tools down the left side and ‘canvas’ grid of triangles which you can fill with various colours to generate the illusion of 3D. You can pinch to zoom the canvas, set your own image backgrounds and it also has the functionality of creating layers to work with.

There are useful export features; save to photos, directly email the image or post to Facebook. But probably the most useful for the real users of this app would be the export to .svg file by emailing the file. I’d like to have seen something like Dropbox integration maybe but it’s still a very powerful feature for working on something whilst out and about, to expand upon it when back in front of your vector drawing tool of choice.

Some examples are available on the official IsoSketch Flickr photostream where you can see what it is really capable of. At £1.99 it’s not bad value at all for a professional graphic designer / artist and maybe even the casual user like me.

Let me know if you’re using it and feel free to link to your own creative works!