Apps for every kind of person flood online stores, and designers have no shortage of apps to directly meet their needs. Here are our top ten apps for designers that are essentials for your mobile device.

Houzz is the app to get if you want to be inspired and stay inspired. The Houzz library of room and building photos, as well as products and decorations, numbers in the tens of thousands, and you can browse it all right form your mobile device. Sift through photos of homes, offices, and other spaces, or look for specific products and discover unique designs that can help you with your next project. Save your favorites to personalized Ideabooks that keep everything you like organized, and read reviews and get professional advice. One of the coolest features is the Ask tag on each photo – there you can ask questions and read other questions and answers people had about anything in the photo.

Free – iPhone/iPad/Android

Phaidon Design Classics will keep any design aficionado busy for days. Coming from one of the leading authorities in design, the Phaidon Design Classics app is an encyclopedic, illustrated history of 1,000 timeless design classics from cars to cameras to toys to airplanes, and more. The app takes the most influential designs and uses them to chart nearly 200 years of product design history. The catalog of products was chosen by design insiders and professionals and includes famous works from designers including Marcel Breuer, Achille Castiglioni, Le Corbusier, Jasper Morrison, and Dieter Rams. Browse through archival photos, 3D product views, originals sketches, prototypes, patents, and text to learn everything there is to know about the most important designs of our time.

$13.99 – iPad

Never leave home without your portfolio with the Behance app. Create your own free online portfolio and easily access it and the portfolios of thousands of other professions through Behance. Project views allow you to upload photos, videos, and other media, and write description texts, cutting down the weight of a traditional portfolio dramatically. You also get access to the entire Behance creative network, letting you search for projects by creative fields like architecture, illustration, interior design, and more, connect with other professionals, and “appreciate” their works.

Free – iPhone/iPad

Kuler for mobile came out a few months ago, and it was about time. The Adobe Kuler website was already letting us experiment with and create custom color palettes, but now with the Kuler app, you can extract the colors you love from your environment and make palettes from them. Upload a photo to Kuler, or use your device’s camera and point it anywhere to have the little color circles jump around the screen and extract colors form your world. You can also use the color wheel to play around with palettes and individual colors, as well as save all your creations to the app and upload them to your Adobe account online.

Free – iPhone/iPad

Behr Color Smart helps you visualize all your color and paint ideas before you execute them. Browse through the extensive paint library Behr has to offer in the app, match colors from your photos, and save your favorites. One of the most helpful tools is the preview option, which lets you choose colors and see how they would look in different rooms. Select from kitchens, dining rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, and more and paint any surface in the photo with a tap of your finger, showing you how your color choices would look in that setting.

Free – iPhone/iPad/Android

Home Design 3D lets you professionally design your next home or building on the go. In 2D mode, you can draw rooms, create openings, add single walls, and change the height or thickness of the walls, and the shape and orientation of the room. Drag and drop to choose from hundreds of objects and pieces of joinery, and change both the interior and exterior of your design. Upgrading to 3D mode will let you take a look at photo-realistic previews of your project. In addition, the new day/night feature will show you exactly where the light will fall at different times of the day.

$6.99 – iPhone/iPad

Drawing and drafting no longer means being chained to a desk with AutoCAD 360. View, edit, and share AutoCAD drawings wherever you are, online and offline. You can now see all your DWG files, including external references, layers, and image underlays in the app, as well as draw and edit shapes with the accuracy of Snap, validate distance measurements in your drawings while onsite, and share and add comments to all your design directly from the app.

Free – iPhone/iPad/Android

Pixel Seek was developed by Designer Pages in collaboration with The Mohawk Group to make searching for carpet easier than ever before. Instead of trying to describe the carpet you want in words, you can use Pixel Seek to extract colors and patterns from photos you take with your mobile device. Upload a photo into the app or take photos inside the app and Pixel Seek gives you suggestions for colors, patterns, and brands of carpet to match.

Free - iPhone/iPad

The Philips Lighting Hub app takes all the guess work out of choosing the best professional lighting fixture for your next project. Look through the full collection of professional lighting portfolios available from Philips, from luminaires to lamps to lighting systems, either online or offline. Different application areas show you the products in action, in outdoor, office, industry, hospitality, retail, healthcare, and entertainment spaces, so you can see exactly how a fixture will look in real life. In addition, new lighting effect filters let you select and view projects based on the lighting effect you are looking for.

Free – iPad/Android

If you thought you couldn’t get super technical with a mobile app, you haven’t heard of BeamCalc. This app lets you calculate the geometry and photometrics of spotlight beams, so you can place your light fixtures and systems in the best places possible. Place and direct up to three light sources from your library to evaluate and compare lighting characteristics including elevation angle, beam and field pool width, illumination, and shadow length. You’ll be able to see, depending on the placement of the light, how bright a light will be, how large its shadow will be, the area the light will cover, and more. It’s a must-have app for any lighting designers or anyone remodeling the light systems in a home or office.

$14.99 – iPhone/iPad