Seeing all the time, effort, emojis, drawings, and true works of art put into an Insta story, we know for sure stories are not what they once were. They’re no longer just pictures and videos shot in real-time. Stories have become a true marketing platform, with intensely strategic moves behind each piece of content published. Every Insta story most likely has a cool (maybe expensive) story app that was used to produce the content.  

With Insta stories looking more polished and aesthetically pleasing than ever, as a designer, you have to be on top of your game. But to what end and to what cost? 

I’m here to help you save a good buck. I’ve got the 10 best free Insta story apps for you to use to improve your Insta stories game without breaking the bank. Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

10 Best Free Insta Story Apps

1. Unfold

Unfold is an amazing Insta story app that is free, but also has in-app purchases if you fancy a certain look and template theme. With many texts and elements to choose from, and themes spanning from elegant or retro, there’s something for everyone.

Try it out today for free: https://unfoldstori.es/

2. Jane

A very underappreciated and not talked about enough app, in my opinion, is Jane. The app is free and has very many free beautiful templates for you to use to spice up your stories. They are quite girly and are perfect for maintaining an elegant or playful story vibe. Create amazing videos with royalty-free music and amazing visuals. Again, this app is free but has in-app purchases. 

Try it out free today: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/%E7%AE%80%E6%8B%BC-jane/id891640660

3. Canva

Canva is hands-down one of the best online CMP’s out there. It’s great for beginner and advanced designers alike. With tons of templates to choose from and customize, you’ll surely find the one that suits your style best. The mobile app is free and has in-app purchases, although you can totally rock with all the free elements and templates and just tune them to your liking.

Try out this app out for free today:https://www.canva.com/app/

4. Hype Type

With a vast and wide collection of fonts, you can do some serious designing with this app. Hype type is absolutely killing the font game. If you’re focused on spreading a message, then this is absolutely the app for you. The app is free with some paid features, but it’s up to you to decide if they’re a necessary buy. 

Check out their app now: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hype-type-moving-text-photo-s/id1152687277

5. Cut Story

Another great app for managing your stories is Cut Story. Cut Story’s is an amazing video editing app where you can create engaging videos and add music, texts, elements, your logo and more to your video. There are special features that you can buy to enhance your UX, but only if you deem necessary.

Try out their free Insta story app now:https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cutstory-for-instagram-stories/id917630934

6. Mojo Story Maker

Mojo is the way to go for Insta stories because they have 100 templates for you to choose from! Customize your stories with text to create relevance, engage with your followers and make them feel what you feel, and share the message you want to portray with them. A huge plus to this app is that you can share your new and improved story directly to your Instagram and also your Snapchat!

Try this Insta story app now: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mojo-stories-editor/id1434861974

7. InShot

For all my influencers out here, Inshot is the app for you. We don’t always have time to film, import, and edit our footage on our laptops or computers, so having this app will be a valuable asset for you. Edit all your video content in a single app on your phone and import it directly to your Instagram. This app is truly a gift to all of us creators out there.

Give it a try if you haven’t already: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.camerasideas.instashot&hl=en 

8. Adobe Spark Post

Adobe, king of all things editing programs, in my own personal opinion. Adobe has great editing programs, from video-editing to photoshopping images, and when they saw an opportunity to create an app to help you create amazing stories to tell your followers, well, we all know they wouldn’t pass that up. With this app you can do more than edit stories photos, you can also edit video and image posts. The app is initially free and then they offer you the chance to upgrade if you end up falling in love with the app.

Go ahead and give this Insta story maker a go: https://spark.adobe.com/features 

10. Over

And last, but not least, we have the app called Over. I love that when you visit their webpage, it’s just absolutely inspiring. It inspires you to be different, to stand out, the influence others. A great app for you to use to for free to make your Insta stories more engaging for your followers and for you to really create a brand name and grow your recognizability.

Stand out of the crowd and try this amazing app free today: https://www.madewithover.com/

Now that you have 10 new and fresh apps for you to choose from to start stepping up your Insta story game, it’s time for you to hop on it. Download any one of these apps and tag us in any of your Instagram stories for a chance to be featured on our stories. Our Instagram handle is @webdesignledger.

Don’t sleep on these amazing free Insta story apps! Try them out today. 

Until next time, 

Stay creative.

With so much information related to the evolution of the graphic design, I don’t think there is any designer who can deny that flat design is one of the latest and hottest trends in the graphic design world. Having its own roots in the minimalist design, this visually simple and simplistic style can have many different forms and definitions. But to clear the things right from the beginning, I think it’s a better option to describe flat design starting from what it isn’t:

1. Flat design is not 3D. In simple words, the style’s name comes from its two-dimensional characteristics that are given by the usage of the flat shapes and of the details that create depth and dimension, such as shadows, textures, and highlights.
2. Flat design is not skeuomorphic. It started as a reaction against skeuomorphism. Designed to suggest or to look like (resemble) the real-world objects or processes, skeuomorphism uses generously effects such as drop shadows, reflections, realistic textures, bevel and emboss, glows and so on.

Flat design started to be a recognizable style in 2012 and 2013 thanks to the release of Windows 8 and iOS 7.

Why is flat design so popular today?

There are many reasons for which the flat website design has taken the web world by storm. Easy user interface, bold colors, sharp images, simple navigation, distinctive fonts, easy to read the text, all together contribute in making flat design the best option for many designers and customers. Indeed, all designers know that flat design is two-dimensional, uses simple graphic design and icons and has some minimalist approach that makes especially the web design projects easy to manage. On the other hand, for the companies which embrace this style, it comes with attributes such as simple user interface, friendly aesthetics, clean, colorful, positive wire-framing effect, minimal, ease of use and maintenance and the list seems to continue.

We see today tons of SaaS companies and products leverage flat design for creating easy to understand and simple products. Here are a few resource management software tools to online banking apps, they all started to embrace flat design and absolutely nail it.

However, the web designers have to face these days not just the challenge of a new relative trend, but they also have to make sure the design is responsive enough to provide the user an easy access on other devices than just desktops.

Taking into consideration the flat design has been around for a few years and is still going strong, for sure it’s more than just a passing trend and it has come here to stay. As for any other trend, there are two sides of the same coin that each designer should know and not just blindly follow the trend.

So, let’s look at flat design pros and cons and also let’s see where it might head in the future.

The PROS

Flat design is trendy

As we’ve already mentioned, flat design is one of the hottest trends nowadays. You may see it everywhere, whether it’s about brand design, print, packaging or web design. Those visual projects that use flat design are on top and this style has gained the attention of many graphic designers in a very short time.

Flat design is compatible with the responsive design

Since Microsoft, Apple and other big brands have embraced the flat design, this style was also adopted as a fresh approach to delivering a great experience to the users. From its appearance until now, it has been and continues to be an excellent choice for web and mobile design – and for some good reasons.

It’s true the flat design principles fits all design categories and can be applied by all of them, but its grid-based layouts and simple visual are particularly suited to web and mobile design because they can be easily resized or rearranged to display on different devices and screen sizes.

Taking into consideration that the number of people connecting to the internet using mobile devices surpassed the number of those who access the internet using a desktop, the reason for choosing flat design website is more than obvious. According to Ryan Allen, flat design can be used to “dynamically scale to a content-appropriate size much simpler than a pixel-perfect design.”

Flexible framework

No matter how you name it – grids, cards or modules – many visuals using the flat look tend to rely their graphics on geometric shapes, especially because this type of layout is easy to scan and navigate. The grids or modules are also flexible frameworks that can be shaped into different configurations. This allows the designers to create visuals that best suits with different design projects and display their content, rather than gather the content in limiting and pre-determined layouts.

Let’s take a look at the two examples listed below:

The San-Francisco based agency Moniker uses grids in different ways to show their work, profile, and news.

On the other hand, these brochure and flyer designs feature different geometric shapes for highlighting various design elements such as typography and icons. Also, the blocks of uniform colors and simple illustration bring the flat look for both of them.

Clean typography

Because of the lack of three-dimensional effects and of the quite simple visual, flat design also provoke the designers to approach the typesetting in a different way. Often, the result is a larger and more streamlined typography that combined with bright colors, bold and creative look makes it look absolutely stunning.

Clean and Sharp Visuals

One of the most important characteristics that make a flat design so appealing and interesting is its sharp design. The icons, shapes, lines, and buttons are all in the minimalist style, making the visual look beautiful. Also, the high-contrast features including bright colors, typography, and boldness all together make the design clean and easy to follow.

The CONS

Lack of Distinctiveness

In terms of visual communication, every business or brand wants its design to communicate their unique characteristics, whether they are using about brochures, posters, websites, apps or something else to convey their message.

One of the downsides of flat designs is the constraints imposed to designers by the minimalist approach and relatively strict rules. With a limited choice of principles to apply, combined with other current graphic design trends, we’re seeing a huge rise in generically designed visuals.

For instance, let’s take a look at the two apps listed below, which are unrelated to each other:

Both of them feature almost the same geometric shapes, use the same color scheme and overlapped white sans-serif text.

Compromised Usability

While they strive to emphasize the flat design’s clean and minimalist qualities, some designers fall into the trap of focusing too much on aesthetics to the detriment of usability. This is a particular risk for the web and mobile design.

Since everything is flat, it’s hard to say what is clickable and what is not. To keep it simple, flat design projects tend to have less “information density”, so, important features and actions can be hidden from the view. Therefore, many users don’t accept with an open heart the too much simplicity in interface design that characterizes the flat design.

Extreme minimalism

The ethos of flat design is to implement the “Swiss Style” philosophy. A philosophy that places heavy emphasis on minimalism amongst other things. But the minimalism included here is a fine line that could be easily overstepped and transform everything in a featureless site.

On the other side, it can be difficult to convey a complicated visual message in flat design. One of the arguments against flat design is the simplicity of user-interface tools. The supporters of skeuomorphic design say the effects that add a sense of realism make the tools easy to use. Frankly, I think it depends on the context.

The FUTURE

Flat 2.0

As the flat design has been around for few years with all its pros and cons, the designers decided to adjust the style according to their needs.

In its early days, the flat design was characterized by a strict visual simplicity. However, for both aesthetic and functional reasons, the recent developments have brought the subtle reintroduction of effects like shadows and textures. The result is a style named “Flat 2.0” or “almost-flat” design.

This style is more of a compromise: you still get the clean simplicity of flat design but add some subtitle 3D effects for a visual variety and improved usability.

Material Design

Including many common characteristics with Flat 2.0, Material Design is a visual language developed by Google that accentuates grid-based layouts and features of “deliberate color choices, edge-to-edge imagery, large-scale typography, and intentional white space” to create a “bold and graphic interface that immerse the user in the experience”.

Considering the material as a metaphor, Material Design uses a paper-inspired approach with “visual cues that are grounded in reality” and “familiar tactile attributes” for helping users to quickly understand and navigate the designs. Also, the “fundamentals of light, surface, and movement are key to conveying how objects move, interact, and exist in space and in relation to each other. Realistic lighting shows seams, divides space, and indicates moving parts.”

As Google Material Design’s guide is free, the designers are encouraged to apply it to their own work, whether they chose to follow closely these guidelines or to pick up and use the elements and techniques they like.

Join the Discussion

Whether you are an advocate of flat design or of skeuomorphism, the two can certainly co-exist. It depends on the context and content. The tricky part, as the last years has shown and for sure the next years will prove, is to find the perfect balance between them.

Where do you see flat design moving? Do you think it is here to stay or taking into consideration the last evolution of the graphic design trends, it will rather evolve to something else? Feel free to share your thoughts and insights in the comments.

Having a smartphone or a tablet is something common these days. Therefore, it’s hard to imagine our day-to-day life without apps that make it much easier and simpler. Whether it’s social media, entertainment, dating, sports, time management,  or even the weather, there is something for everyone.

But an app that’s difficult to figure out how it works, unintuitive, or ineffective will not win many hearts. The best apps provide great user experience and have powerful, useful features that are paired with beautiful and intuitive interfaces.

So, instead of just describing a few nice app designs, we’ve decided to take it to the next level and share with you what we consider to be the best of the best. Below you’ll find a list of 35 of awesome mobile apps when it comes to UI design. These apps really stood out because they went above and beyond to be visually appealing and useful.

Movie/Video

YouTube

YouTube’s mobile app is sleek and intuitive, bringing the whole content of the video sharing site to your fingertips. For those subscribed to YouTube Red, you’ll have access to all the premium content, as well as special features.

HBO Go / HBO Now

Both HBO Now (HBO’s standalone service for $15/month) and HBO Go (a streaming app available to HBO cable subscribers) have apps that allow you to watch all of HBO’s streaming content directly on your phone.

Spotify

Spotify is the best full-featured streaming service. With this app, you can stream any music from any type of device, make your own playlists, follow artists, and sync tracks for offline listening.

Google Play Music

Google’s official streaming service is a strong competitor to Spotify. Not only does the app provide a vast library of content, but it also allows users to upload up to 50,000 songs for online storage. This means you can download and stream your music on any Android device, at any time.

Fitness, Athletic, Workouts

Nike+ Run Club

The Nike+ Run Club App tracks your runs and helps you reach your goals – whether it’s running your first race, or setting a new personal record. You can also measure your progress every mile, get a training program and compete with your friends.

Loox Fitness Planner

With Loox Fitness Planner app you get training goals like losing weight, building muscles or body shaping by choosing your perfect workout plan. There are about 300 training plans that motivate you to stay on track.

Calorie Counter – MyFitnessPal

If you really want to lose weight and get in shape, then you need to start counting those calories. We recommend this app from MyFitnessPal because it is easy, accessible, and completely free.

RunKeeper

Turn your phone into a personal trainer and track your runs via GPS. You can get detailed stats on your workouts, listen to music, get audio cues to spur you on, and share your progress.

Daily Yoga

Yoga is unbelievably powerful. It strengthens your core, increases flexibility and focus, and decreases stress. Plus, it can help you lose weight and stay healthy. This app will guide you through daily yoga routines of varying difficulty and length, and step-by-step, HD videos showing exactly how to do each pose.

Social Media

Instagram

Instagram is a simple way of capturing and sharing the world’s moments. This app is ubiquitous in photography now, so you might as well have it on your phone. Owned by Facebook, the social network centered on photos offers great filters and connectivity with others.

Facebook

The biggest social network on the planet right now has a decent official app. Keep up with your friends and family, jump into instant chats, and stay informed with push notifications. It’s also your personal organizer for storing, saving and sharing photos.

Pinterest

Pinterest is the go-to social network for finding and sharing inspiration on creative projects, hobbies, fashion, and more. The app features the same functionality as the website, allowing you to “pin” and “repin” posts from other users to various boards, so you can share and save new ideas.

Twitter

Twitter’s microblogging platform brought about the now-ubiquitous internet facet, hashtags. Connect with your friends, share new favorite content, follow celebrities, and get breaking news as it happens. You can customize your profile with a photo, description, location, and background photo.

Messaging

Skype

The Skype you know and love has an all-new design, with new features and new ways to stay connected with the people. Besides text, you can send photos, videos, voice messages, Mojis and more. You can also respond to any message with reactions. Also, you may swipe quickly to capture photos and videos.

Whatsapp

WhatsApp Messenger is a free messaging app available for Android and other smartphones. WhatsApp uses your phone’s Internet connection (4G/3G/2G/EDGE or Wi-Fi, as available) to let you message and call friends and family. Switch from SMS to WhatsApp to send and receive messages, calls, photos, videos, documents, and Voice Messages.

Tinder

Tinder is the ultimate dating app for mobile users, thanks to its location-centric features, and regardless of what its reputation may be, it’s still a great way to meet people. Your next match could be a swipe right away.

Bumble

Similar to Tinder in terms of presentation, Bumble is designed to flip the usual gender dynamics of dating from women to men. The app only allows women to message first, reducing the chances of setting awkward pickup lines or situations. In the same sex matches, either person can message first.

Blogging

Tumblr

The app allows you to discover and post about stuff you love, and join communities of people who love the same stuff like you. You can repost other people’s posts to your own blog and can add comments if you like. Also, other people can do the same with your posts.

Blogger

This is the official app for one of the most popular blogging platforms on the Internet. You can compose, edit, and post directly to your blog, and much more. If you have more than one account or blog, you can switch easily between them.

Cooking

Zomato

Zomato lets you search for and discover restaurants to eat out at or order in from. You can search by location, cuisine, budget, user reviews and ratings, and use the map feature to guide you there. There’s also a handy shake feature to get a random suggestion if you just can’t decide.

Food Network

Get instant access to your favorite Food Network chefs and personalities, including thousands of their most popular recipes featured on their TV shows and specials. How-to videos and shopping list features will equip you with everything you need to make a great meal.

Yummly

Featured on the Today Show, Yummly matches over 1 million recipes to your cooking lifestyle’s nutrition, diet, food allergies, and favorite cuisines. The app allows you to collect, save and organize your favorite recipes in your digital recipe box and discover customized recipe recommendations.

Money and Shopping

Paypal

By downloading the app, you’ll be able to manage your PayPal account at a glance. It is the easiest online method to manage all the ways you send, receive and spend money. The app can also notify you of transactions, offering handy reminders and alerts when you use PayPal as a payment method or have an upcoming bill due.

Mint

Mint is the free money manager and financial tracker app from the makers of TurboTax® that does it all. Mint can keep track of multiple bank accounts or credit cards to help you stay on budget and out of the red.

Amazon Shopping

The Amazon Shopping app lets you shop millions of products and manage your Amazon orders from anywhere. Browse the vast collection of products quickly and easily. Plus, you can enable notifications for daily Amazon Gold Box deals so you never miss out on a discount.

Travel & Events

Uber

Uber is a ridesharing app for fast, reliable rides in minutes — day or night. Uber allows you to call upon a private driver in your city who will help you get to where you need to go, and it’s easy to pay by credit or cash in select cities.

Airbnb

By using the Airbnb app, you may find adventures in faraway places or your hometown, and access unique homes, experiences, and places around the world. You can search for accommodation, communicate directly with hosts, book everything your trip needs, or start earning money as a host.

Going Out

Foursquare City Guide

Foursquare City Guide will lead you to the perfect spot — anywhere in the world. Get helpful, positive tips from our trusted global community and keep track of where you’ve been and where you want to go, all in one place.

Yelp

Yelp puts great local businesses at your fingertips. Whether you’re looking for a pizzeria near you or the best handyman in town, the app is your guide to finding the perfect places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play. Find reviews, locations, and other important information for any business you’re looking for.

Documents & Management

Dropbox

Dropbox’s mobile app keeps your files and your team in sync. You can access any file saved in Dropbox from all of your devices and send large files even to people who don’t have a Dropbox account. And with features like the doc scanner, shared folders, offline access, and more, collaborating with others is simple.

Trello

Trello gives you the perspective over all your projects, at work and at home. The project management app allows you to create boards to organize anything you’re working on, customize workflows for different projects and much more. You may use it solo or invite other people to collaborate. If you work offline, the boards will sync automatically when reconnected.

Teamweek

Perfect for multinational and remote teams, Teamweek app is a simple-to-use project and resource planner that gives a great overview on a shared team calendar. You may spot who’s available and schedule upcoming projects for both the short- and long term.

Toggl

Toggl is the leading timesheet app for tracking worked hours. By using the timer, you may log task times and get reports based on the time usage. All the time logs are synced to the cloud and you can track time also in the web version, desktop app, Chrome extension and with an Android watch – all your data is safely stored under one account.

Google Drive

Google Drive is a safe place for all your files and puts them within reach from any smartphone, tablet, or computer. The app lets you store up to 15GB of files and access them wherever and whenever you need to. Once you save the files there, you can easily invite others to view, edit, or leave comments on any of your files or folders.

Evernote

Evernote is an elegant solution when it comes to taking all sorts of notes and getting work done. The app gives you the tools you need to keep your work effortlessly organized — from taking notes with supporting photos, to writing to-do-list and much more. Tag, sync, and organize for a real productivity boost.

In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to draw the iOS Photos app icon in Adobe Illustrator.

Download Adobe Illustrator.

In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to design an activity user interface in Adobe Illustrator.

Download Adobe Illustrator.

Pinterest, the popular social network, has recently revamped the design of its iOS app. The new version claims to be extra fast and extra clean, and focuses more on functionality and usability.

To quote the official blog post:

With so many people using our app, it’s more important than ever to make sure it works great for everyone—no matter where you live, what language you speak or how old your phone is.

The new iOS Pinterest app comes with a modern and cleaner UI for pins. Plus, it is not available in 31 languages, loads up to three times faster as compared to the older versions of the app.

These changes have laid the groundwork for future improvements, too. Now that we’ve rebuilt things in a smarter way, engineers and designers here at Pinterest will be able to develop features faster than ever before.

The new version of the Pinterest app is currently only available for iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads, though the Android versions are not too far behind either, and currently under development.

What do you think of the new design of the Pinterest app for iOS devices? Share your views in the comments below!

Memory is a precious resource on mobile devices, especially because it is shared by different apps and if one runs multiple apps, memory hog can be a big issue that can affect the performance of even the best of mobile phones and tablets in an adverse manner.

To fix this, Facebook has come up with a set of tools to detect memory leak on iOS devices.

The Facebook official app for iOS devices comes with several features that tend to share memory, and even if one such feature misbehaves, it can cause memory leak and crash the app or even worse, compel you to restart your phone or device. If you are wondering what memory leak is, it happens if a given portion of the device’s memory is allotted to a given object, but after the object terminates, the app or the system does not free that portion of memory.

To fix this issue, Facebook has devised an automated solution to detect memory leak on iOS. Here is how Facebook describes it:

Automating the process would allow us to find memory leaks faster without much developer involvement. To address that issue, we have built a suite of tools that allow us to automate the process and fix a number of problems in our own codebase. Today, we are excited to announce that we are releasing these tools: FBRetainCycleDetector, FBAllocationTracker, and FBMemoryProfiler.

To learn more, check out Facebook Developers blog.

What do you think of this innovation? Share your views in the comments below!