We at circleindigo have recently invested in the time and effort to review, refresh and redesign our website which had not really been looked at with fresh and kind eyes for more years than we care to mention or admit to!

With the excellent support and work of SalesRemedy (salesremedy.co.uk) and Bright Cherry (brightcherry.co.uk) we now have our new site in place, and hopefully if you are reading this, you will have already seen it, if not visit us at www.circleindigo.com.Part of the redesign and refresh has involved us recreating and redrawing the simple graphics we use throughout our site.

Previously these were hand drawn and created on Bamboo tablets with a stylus pen and captured on a desktop or laptop computer. Technology has of course moved on significantly and there are now some great apps available to do the same kind of graphic work but on your preferred tablet. We use the Apple I-Pad and so tested various drawing apps and pens/styli. We trialed ‘Notability’ but as it states it is a far better app for taking notes than drawing! We also looked at the app made by Bamboo, the producer of the old desk based tablet we used, the app is great and the Bamboo stylus/pen is probably one of the, if not the, best on the market (we actually use the Bamboo stylus pen!). The Bamboo app produces great, crisp and clear drawings but when you run out of ‘paper’ you have to make ‘in-app’ purchases to get more.

The app we prefer and like best for functionality, brush strokes and free (!) paper/books is called Paper and is made by a company called 53. You do initially have to make some in-app purchases to get all the pens, brushes etc. but you don’t have to buy paper when you run out and you can create as many ‘books’ in the app as you need to, with as many pages in each book as you need.

It allows you to do some fantastic drawings, paintings etc. and we have created new, simple, clean graphics for our website using this app. Another piece of software we have use lots in the past has been Whiteboard Photo. This software, running on a desk or lap top machine, allowed you to take photos you had taken on a camera of flip charts and outputs and downloaded to your machine, straighten, edit and clean up your photos and recreate them in to compressed images that actually looked like your flip charts or whiteboard outputs. It also reduced the overall meg size so that you could easily e-Mail them or put them in to documents, presentations etc.

We have been trying hard to find an equivalent and suitable replacement for Whiteboard Photo tool/app for the I-Pad, and finally after struggling to find one and with huge thanks to a recent workshop participant who showed us one he was using we are now using CamScanner+ Pro and it does exactly what we had been looking for and so much more. So if you want to take digital photos using either or I-Pad or phone, clean, straighten and digitise them so they look like flip chart output and not just photos of flip charts, capture them in one folder, compress the size, use them in documents or presentations and e-Mail them to others then this is the App for you and the best bit is that it currently only costs £2.99!

And finally, for another great App to use to capture group output live during a session, meeting or workshop, with the ability to zoom in and out, change colours and pens quickly, save your outputs to e-Mail them later, then check out Adobe Ideas as it does all of this and more.