Chinagram

A featured project project on April 2011

In 2010 the iPad was released gaining a lot of attention by the whole designers community, and with ToDo we decide to explore the possibilities of this amazing device. We understood the potential of the iPad as learning device so we started a collaboration with Vallardi Editore, an Italian publisher specialized in the learning field.

We choose to make a reinterpretation of the book “La scrittura cinese” (Chinese writing) by Yuan Huaquing, for two reasons mainly:
First, in that period there was a lot of hype about the rising of chinese culture, and the interest in the chinese culture was growing fast;
Second, the book was structured as a sheet collector, so we thought that it will be easier to transpose into a digital tool.

The project took almost a year because we were developing as an internal project, and it is known that internal project are meant to be stopped when arrives other payed projects, but we was not worried because we wanted to create an application capable to last in time, not just a fast-selling app.
I stepped into the project from the very beginning with many roles: interaction designer, graphic designer, project manager, content manager.
There was few iPad app at the time so there wasn’t many consolidated interaction patterns and I was quite free to explore and invent new way to navigate the contents.

During the project I tested a lot of different variants, organized the contents, designed the UI and produced all the assets for the graphic design. We launched the application on April 2011 as “The application for iPad that tells the story of Chinese writing, explaining its logic and showing its beauty, sign after sign.”

At the end of 2011, we started to create the iPhone companion of the app. Here I’m sketching and testing the UI, the Information Architecture and the user flow for the iPhone.

Chinagram for iPad was featured on iTunes Store all over the world, and appeared in the Apple’s “Learn” TV commercial campaign, and it is still receiving a lot of appreciations.

Chinagram is still available on the iTunes Store
www.chinagram.info

This is one of the most important project in my career, since I managed almost everything of the design and development of the app, from the organisation of the content with the author of the original book to creating the illustrations, from the development of a custom CMS to manage the contents to designing the icon. The most important thing, that make me very proud is that we totally succeed in creating a long-lasting, useful and beautiful app.