Creative Motivation: Top Five Apps for Enhancing Your Creativity

AMY DAVIDSON

Speaking from experience; my creative process is a very messy one with paints, papers and pens strewn all over the desk and floor. It’s a kind of explosive, creative chaos which is important to creating unstructured space for new ideas and ways of working to come to life. However, what’s often not talked about by creatives is that being organised around your creativity actually creates the space and structure for this chaos to be birthed and contained!

It seems that creative organisation is underrated. In an effort to debunk this way of thinking, we surveyed our team of Artists at Cork and Chroma and asked them what apps they use to organise or enhance their creative process. You may know some of these already, but perhaps you’re not using them to their potential or in a way that streamlines and supports you, so be sure to grab a cuppa and read on.

1. Instagram

You probably have your favourite artists or accounts on Instagram that inspire you, however, you may not always see their content due to the strange and ever-changing algorithms. To ensure you see your favourite accounts first, turn on the notifications for their posts and stories.

Another cool tip is the collections feature, where you can save posts in different digital folders to resource later. This is really good for collating visual inspiration into different areas that you can easily go back to. To bookmark a post, click the ribbon symbol on the bottom right-hand side of the image > save to collection > click + to add a new folder and name it or save into a pre-existing folder. Voila!

If you forget to bookmark a post you love, but clicked the bookmark or heart, then you may have a chance of finding it again… maybe (if a user deletes the post, it’s gone). To view all the posts you’ve liked, go to your profile > options (gear icon on Apple or three dots on Andriod > posts you’ve liked. We recommend popping your faves in collections so you’re sure to find it later or taking a sneaky screenshot.

2. Pinterest

Pinterest may be another app you use sporadically, however, it is the bomb for visual brainstorming and creating online mood boards for a project, whether it be a new DIY project at home, haircut or a presentation at work. We love that it keeps all your visual imagery stored in one place and with just one click it will take you back to the website you pinned it from – so you never lose the original resource. Not only can you create separate boards to organise your projects, you can now create sections within a board to keep subcategories neatly organised too. When viewing your pins altogether on your board, you really get a feel for what images are working together and what doesn’t quite match the overall aesthetic. This is hands down the best app for gathering inspiration for creative projects.

3. Evernote

Evernote is a great app for organising your ideas and notes into categories so you don’t lose important information. Gone are the days of scrolling through your generic notes app on your iPhone to try to find your wifi password or that great idea you had on the bus last year coming home from seeing an exhibition. With Evernote, you can sort each individual note into notebooks which represent the overall subject. You can also tag your notes, so you can search and find them easily. You can take hasty notes on-the-go by writing or squiggling with your finger, attach photos and documents such as PDFs, jpegs, or simply type. It also syncs between all your devices so you can use it on your phone or computer.

4. Trello

Trello. Think of a massive whiteboard organised into different sections of Post-it notes at a big team meeting that anyone can add to or edit. This is the underlying structure of Trello, except it’s online. In other words, it’s a visual task management app for working with more than one person on projects. And to give you a bit of insider info to the behind the scenes of Cork & Chroma, it’s what our Content Team uses to keep track of all the creative projects we have on the go. It’s visual and easy to use, plus you can tag people so they know when the ball is back in their court!

5. Headspace

With all the planning and organising that goes into making creative magic happen, we also believe that taking time to get off the thinking and doing treadmill does your mind and creativity a world of good. That’s why our last app is Headspace – a meditation app which provides meditations from 3 – 20 minutes of your choosing to help you centre yourself during a busy day or as a ritual to begin or end your days with. You can sign up for free and try the basics or join for more in-depth series of meditations focusing on work, productivity, sleep and anxiety.

Organisation may seem counterintuitive to getting creative, but we hope you can see that taking a little bit of time to invest in some systems around your creative process can give you a lot more freedom when actually creating.

Need more inspiration?

Download our free iPhone wallpapers to remind you of what’s important when creating.