Storyboard artists finally have an application to call their own with the release of Boardfish, page layout software for OS X that's designed from the ground up for assembling individual panels unto a full storyboard layout.

Boardfish was originally developed for in-house use at San Francisco design and production company Swordfish, which establish a sister company called Mekajiki to turn internal software into products.

"Most of our projects require boards of some sort — mood boards, storyboards, UX flows, shooting boards — and I have always been frustrated by the inefficient toolsets found in our off-the-shelf software for assembling boards," said Matt Silverman, executive creative director and CEO of Mekajiki and Swordfish. "Over the past decade, I’ve helped design and develop storyboard plug-ins and scripts for [Adobe] After Effects and InDesign, but nothing completely solved my production problems. I finally decided that the only way to do it right was to build a full-blown OS X application and, with the help of my partners at Mekajiki, Boardfish was born."

Boardfish allows users to begin with drawings, photographs, 3D models or wireframes that can be dragged and dropped in the interface to create boards with up to four captions per panel. Panels can be rearranged and hidden, with animated reflowing, and the application offers control of page size and orientation, panel layout and spacing, fonts, colors, and caption placement. Corporate logos can be imported for use on title pages and in headers and footers, and boards can be printed or exported as PDFs.

Boardfish is available for $99 from a dedicated website as well as from aescripts + aeplugins, and a free trial is available.

Boardfish: boardfish.io