Launching today
ArtDeck
Reference boards with visual study tools built in
13 followers
Reference boards with visual study tools built in
13 followers
Most reference apps stop at collecting. ArtDeck helps you study what you save: value, color, composition and motion with onion skinning, right on the board. Native on iPhone, iPad and Mac, offline and synced through your iCloud. Buy once and no subscription.
Hi Product Hunt 👋
I'm Alexandre, a solo developer. Last November I was working on concepts for a personal game project. My references were in PureRef, my links were in Notion, I was checking things in Photoshop and painting in Procreate. Two devices, three screens, four different tools. All for what was essentially one activity: drawing.
None of those tools was really the problem. PureRef is beloved for good reason. The problem was what happened between them. Every switch took me a little further out of what I was doing. PureRef didn't follow me to the iPad, and nothing quite held the whole mess together.
ArtDeck is a reference board where you can collect, organize and study. It's an infinite canvas for images, video, GIFs, links, notes and PDFs. It works offline and syncs through your own iCloud across iPhone, iPad and Mac.
It also quietly replaced my Notion visual library. Links become cards with previews, so I can keep an idea beside its source instead of trying to remember why I saved it six months later.
Some design choices are a little opinionated. I made the Gallery a carousel because choosing a board should feel more like flipping through a deck than opening a file manager. There is still a grid when you need it, but I wanted a little fun on top of the utility. The same instinct is behind the animations for deleting items and for creating or dissolving groups.
ArtDeck started from a drawing problem, but you don't need to draw to use it. A designer working in Illustrator can keep references, palettes and notes beside a project. A creator can build a moodboard and share a visual direction. If your brain likes putting things next to each other instead of burying them in folders, it should feel familiar.
The part I care most about is the Toolbox: five lenses and fifteen tools so far, applied directly to any image or video frame. Strip an image to grayscale, map it into a value ladder, or reduce it to a two-value notan to see the masses. Pull out a palette and leave it beside the source. Check composition, squint everything down to the big shapes, or measure angles and proportions.
Onion skinning became one of my favorite parts. Drop in a video or GIF, move through it frame by frame, and see the frames before and after overlaid on the current one. I wanted motion references to behave like references you can actually examine, rather than videos that simply sit on the board.
None of these techniques is new, obviously. Artists have been using them forever with tracing paper, rulers and by squinting from across the room. I just wanted those tools one tap away from the reference itself.
Some things fought back. HDR looks like one standard until you discover that it is closer to a collection of competing interpretations. At some point, you realize you are choosing a position rather than simply implementing a spec. Sync means several live devices, each with its own truth, and CloudKit arriving with another one on top.
The release target was February. Then the end of April. In May I was sure only two weeks were left. Hi.
It's a one-time purchase, no subscription (I'm tired of those), and no account. Sync stays in your iCloud, so I don't need to build another service around your work and charge you for it.
There's a theme editor too, because apparently one set of design decisions wasn't enough. You can make ArtDeck yours and share the result.
I built ArtDeck for game concepts and drawing references, but that is only one way to use it. Would your first board be for a design project, a moodboard, research, or something I haven't considered?