Paper, designed by FiftyThree in New York and Seattle, features a simple and beautiful interface design that is a joy to use.

FiftyThree created Paper as a place where ideas can easily blossom. Does a person really need 500 brush types? 8,000 colors? An endless array of filter options while attempting to capture the essence of an idea? If so, this probably isn't the app for you. Instead, Paper gives the user a limited palette and toolset, creating constraints from which beautiful renderings and focused ideas can surface. The tools are carefully crafted with ultra-realistic textures and strokes, making the sketches both realistic and attractive.

The gestures are intuitive, and the app allows you the artist to create a library of personalized sketchbooks with as many or as few pages as they'd like in each. This allows users to not only develop ideas, but to remember them in context or chronicle events through sketch and drawing.

Some other hand-picked posts you might enjoy on our Design Blog:

Composite: Live Video Painting on the iPad
An Interactive and Animated Starry Night by Petros Vrellis
Drawing on a Tablet: The iPad as Sketchbook