Print must die!

It all begins with a love of print… For several thousand years the printed work has evolved and build our world. A craft that has been universal across all disperate cultures and evolved in many direction to finally reach ubiquity a hundred or so years ago.

It’s from our fondness of the printed word that we attempt to invent on the iPad.

We love books, we love magazines. From our appreciation and from the box of back-issues we all warehouse in our basements that Katachi’s goal appeared. We want to make as beautiful and moving a medium as the printed word. We think it can be done on the iPad, and we sure as hell know it hasn’t yet.

The web didn’t build upon these print foundations and for that we see a medium dominated by monotony and content without form. We like the web too, but not as much as print. In order for that fate to be avoided on the iPad, we took laws into our own hands.

We built tools that relied on the skill of a typical graphic designer not a web designer. I had a meeting this week with a very talented graphic designer, showing off our design tool, Origami Design. Mid way through our discussion the design mentioned span’s as in in HTML. I stop the conversation right there and attempted to derail this kind of thinking.

When designing, interactive or interpassive (print/video), a designer should rely on their skills in communicating. leading, kerning, form, color etc. Not or CSS or jQuery. Many of the best designers avoid the web because of the tech talk and thinking need to wrangle it. We think this is a great loss and aim to remedy it for touch based interactive design.

We wanted to demonstrate that you can communicate interactive content by following traditional graphic design thinking. And no code. So we built a Desktop app that could do just that. TO see if we succeeded you have to see it for yourself. And if your a graphic designer and think you can do better, then we have achieved our goal.