Awesome Curating App Perfectly Mashes Up Pinterest, Evernote, and Instagram

Curator began like many apps do. Its founder, architect Daniel Nordh, was working on an iPad, realized a need for something (in this case, a digital pinboard to keep track of notes, photos, and rendering for projects), and couldn’t find one. So he made it himself. “I thought it was just an obvious idea, to seal my content together in one grid, and then move it around,” he says.

At the time, in 2012, Nordh worked for City Hall in London, advising design projects for public spaces. Nordh sat in a lot of meetings where laptops weren’t allowed, and you couldn’t be seen looking at your phone, since that’s rude. So he bought an iPad, which, thanks to the unobtrusive tablet shape, was more meeting-friendly. He liked it, but “was frustrated that content or things I saved were fragmented by different apps,” he says. “That wasn’t conducive to working on projects.”

Nordh built and designed Curator himself. The app, he says, is totally tailored to the iPad. It’s a super spare series of cells that, once you tap on them, let you retrieve images from Pinterest, Dropbox, Instagram, or notes and material from Evernote. (Or, you can just manually type in a new note.) The app is minimalist, and there’s not a whole lot to look at, because Curator is a support network for the user’s content. Everything else fades into the background, on purpose.

“It’s really your content you want to see,” Nordh says. As we become more mobile, and our files and ideas confusingly live in the cloud, or on another computer, or wherever, having a series of simple digital mood boards sounds like an appealing way to get organized. Plus, the iPad creates a unique opportunity to conjure up the tactility of a blank canvas that some designers might miss. “You wouldn’t have that feeling of touch, of moving between things very freely, on a desktop.”

 Curator

Phrases like “saving content” inevitably call to mind Pinterest, which was the darling of the tech world in 2012, when Nordh started working on Curator. Like Pinterest, Curator is a grid, and like Pinterest, Curator lets you virtually stick a bunch of images together. But whereas Pinterest drives discovery, Curator drives careful selection. “We’re constantly drowning in new content, on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest this feed keeps showing us new stuff. Often in the creative process it’s important to be very selective and just take things that matter.” It also drives work, by acting like a on-the-go storyboard for anyone planning or sequencing projects.

Plus, if you think about it, a creative director would never pull up Pinterest in a client meeting. “Your content should always be presentable,” Nordh says. “You have to pitch all the time as a creative.”