The way I've formatted that title might suggest to the uninitiated that I have made creative software which you can obtain from me. That was a deliberate vaguity, but I cannot write software, I have little desire to learn how to write software, and even if I did have a desire to write software, I certainly wouldn't be making creative tools of this caliber by myself. I'd be generating crappy indie games for Steam at a frankly alarming rate.
There's an alternate universe out there where this is the case, I promise.
No, this list is of the 5 pieces of software I turn to most in my creative endeavors. Those endeavors include writing, visualizing, and producing stuff ranging from music and videos to books and table-top RPGs. These are the 5 pieces of software that I heartily recommend to anyone interested in those pursuits and the reasons why I use them. If this winds up looking like an infomercial for the Mac because half of these are Mac exclusives... well, yeah. I've been saying for years that a creative who just wants their software to work and their OS to leave them alone should be buying a Mac, despite their various warts. For these use cases, they just work better.
#5: iMovie
These first couple of entries are low-hanging fruit, but the simple truth is that if you want to dabble in video editing without a huge investment of time or money starting out with iMovie on a Mac, iPad, or even your iPhone is probably the best way to do that. It will familiarize you with the basics of a timeline editing experience, and it's just feature-rich enough for you to happily create your first videos/films. No, it's not going to let you produce incredibly rich edits or anything like that, but if it turns out you want to level up your editing game later on iMovie gives you a confident background to build on when you jump up to something like DaVinci Resolve (which is also free) or Apple's own Final Cut Pro (which isn't).
For my part the editing I do is generally pretty dang simple, and iMovie meets pretty much all of my needs just fine. Do I wish I could stack more than two video streams in the timeline? Yeah. Would it be nice if a few more audio options were baked into the software? Absolutely. But for the most part iMovie covers me just fine and I haven't had serious cause to consider trading up yet.
#4: GarageBand
If you own an Apple device and you haven't played with GarageBand at all, you need to fix that right now. As an entry level free digital audio workstation, or DAW, GarageBand is absolutely top of the class. Does it have all of the pro-level features you need to produce top-100 hit tracks? No. But is it better than it has any right being considering it's available for free to anyone with an iPhone? Absolutely yes.
There are other free or open-source DAW's out there, but absolutely none of them come close to touching GarageBand for its ease of use and the quality of its included instruments and samples. The AI drummer feature alone puts most commercial DAWs to absolute shame, and again... it's free. Sure, Ableton gives you a massive pool of powerful features, and Logic Pro offers all the positives of GarageBand with loads more heaped on top. But unless you are a genuine audio professional already well-versed in the feature sets of powerful pro DAWs I think you'll be stunned at what you can accomplish in GarageBand with relatively little work.
#3: Affinity Designer
Okay, you're gonna have to pay for this one, but believe me it's worth every penny. Let's start here; have you ever heard of Adobe? Of their "creative suite"? That subscription service of software that's evidently required for any creative professional? You may have noticed I haven't mentioned any of those yet and figured that was because I was sticking to cheap-as-free software for this list. But that's simply not true. I use GarageBand because it's better than Audition (fight me), and even if I did want a pro-level video editing suite I'd go for Final Cut or Resolve ages before I touched Premier with a thousand-foot pole. The simple fact is I kinda hate Adobe, I think their software (with the possible exception of Photoshop) is all incredibly over-hyped, and I refuse to give them money.
But I do quite a bit of graphic design these days. Generating logos for TTRPGs or covers for books and album artwork is the kind of thing that, honestly, it's tough to do easily with free or open-source software. In the past I would have used Illustrator, but again, I hate Adobe. Thankfully they don't have a monopoly on extremely competent vector image editors. Affinity Designer is pretty much every bit as powerful as Illustrator, and for my money it's more friendly to use. Switching from Illustrator to Designer did entail a bit of a learning curve, but I got over that in a couple of days without too much effort, and even at its full (NON SUBSCRIPTION) price of $50 I heartily recommend this over the Adobe counterpart. The only real feature it's missing is the ability to image-trace stuff into vector formats, but honestly if you're using that feature in Illustrator regularly you've already gone horribly wrong somewhere and you need to stop.
#2: Comic Draw
This is obviously extremely niche, this one. This one requires you to A) want to write comics, and B) want to do that almost exclusively on an iPad. I figure that's not going to apply to as many people as the last few entries, but if it does apply to you the $20 Comic Draw app is honestly outstanding. When you first look at it you're going to think the thing is designed exclusively for amateurs who want to create stupid tossed-together comics from their vacation photos or something like that. Don't be fooled. Comic Draw is a full end-to-end solution, with tools to help carry you from scripting to pencils to line work to lettering to coloring. It's not, perhaps, the best version of each of those tools, but being able to shepherd a page through the entire creative process from start to finish all within the same app is genuinely pretty nice.
To be absolutely clear, I don't actually use the full end-to-end functionality of this app. I write my scripts elsewhere, and I usually color in Procreate on my iPad. But Comic Draw allows me to organize my comics easily and provides glanceable feedback on my progress and my quality, and for those features alone I don't see myself going anywhere else anytime soon. It also offers a highly customizable set of styles that allows you to be very repeatable from one page to the other in a book or issue of a comic, which is pretty unique versus other one-stop-shop software tools I've looked at for comic authoring.
#1: Pages
Somebody somewhere is already frothing at the mouth over this one, but two things; if you're about to suggest that Word is a better word processor, you've been brainwashed by decades of monopolistic behavior to think that "bloated into a buggy pile of poo with an overabundance of useless features" is the same thing as "good", and frankly you're just wrong. But I'm not here to argue that Pages is the best word processor. It's perfectly average on that front. I'd rather use it than Word, but I'd rather use something like LibreOffice or Scrivener or heck, NotePad for pure word-smithing if for no other reason than file format interoperability. No, Pages is on here because of my document layout activities.
Pages is my document layout software of choice.
Oh-ho-ho I've just made another group angry. Listen, Adobe fanboys, why you're still here after the Affinity Designer entry I don't understand, but let me be clear; I have thousands of hours of InDesign experience, and day after day for easily and quickly producing professional-looking documents I turn to Pages. Is it free? Yes. But that's not why I do. Its features are easy to use and, paramount to any professional workflow, incredibly consistent. They work the way you expect them to 100% of the time. InDesign is more like 60% of the time. Document layout in Word works the way you expect approximately 0% of the time. The simple fact is I love Pages not only because it lets me create the documents I see in my head, but because it lets me do that quickly and efficiently since it works the same way every time I sit down to it. So far it's the only layout software I've ever used that does that.
Unless you consider a browser rendering HTML/CSS to be "layout software" I suppose. That's consistent. And also a pain in the butt.
Honorable Mention: Procreate
Procreate is an outstanding app for the iPad, and paired with an Apple Pencil it's genuinely among the best digital drawing or painting setups I've ever seen. But I hardly find it irreplaceable, so that's why it's not one of the 5. If you prefer to work with a pen display you can use Procreate on computers as well, but there it's going up against Photoshop and Corel Paint, which is tough competition. There are also other competent painting apps on the iPad that have various strengths and weaknesses versus Procreate, so it's worth shopping around.
But if you're looking for a solid all-around digital art app for your iPad and Pencil, Procreate is an easy recommendation at a single purchase price of $20. Just so you know. I felt obligated to put this entry down here because all of my art outside of the literal comic strips done in Comic Draw happens here, so I figured my entire pipeline wouldn't be properly represented without at least mentioning Procreate.
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