#parableapp

Sabrina Arnault’s pieces have a beautiful clean simplicity. Expressive and casual in depictions of everyday life, her work captured us. We sat down with Sabrina and had a chat about her work. 

Please tell us about yourself. What excites you? What are your passions?

I am a French illustrator based in Spain. I really enjoy travelling and discovering new places. I love to feel the atmosphere of a city or see a landscape I never seen before. It can be very inspiring.

What is your design philosophy?

I try to make my designs as simple and efficient as possible in the order to give them more impact and a timeless appearance. I also think that is important to follow my instinct and give advantage to things that came out naturally. When I force myself too hard, I never like the final result.

We are fascinated with drawings of this lady. Is there a story behind her?

There is no special story behind this illustration. As you can see in my work, I love to draw women! I think it’s a very interesting subject with a lot of aspects to work on as shapes or attitudes.

What projects are you currently working on?

I just finished illustrating a book and am currently working on illustrations for a coloring book and magazines. I am also developing new products for my shop.

As an artist what are some problems you face? Can technology help solve them?

I think that the most recurrent problem is the fact that, most of the time; people don’t give credibility to artists. Most of people who want to work with us tend to think that they don’t need to pay us because, you know, drawing is not a real job! ;) I’m caricaturing but unfortunately I still receive a lot of mail of people who want me to work for free.

Parable had a big debut in Turkey. Here are five beautiful and creative posts that gave us a glimmer of every day life.

Cat demanding food

Reminder about the importance of history

Turkish Candy!

Scenes of everyday life.

We interviewed Kellen Hatanaka a Toronto-based illustrator and designer. Kellen is the author of Work: An Occupational ABC, an intelligent and imaginative children’s book that is an alphabetical tour through the coolest jobs you can imagine. 

1. What’s your design philosophy?

I definitely feel responsible for everything that I put out into the world so my goal is to make every piece, my best work. In terms of execution, I try to strip the subject down to the most simplified form while clearly communicating the subject to the audience.

2. What projects are you currently working on?

I just finished my second book with Groundwood Books called Drive: A Look At Roadside Opposites and I am currently working on my third book Tokyo Digs A Garden written by Jon-Erik Lappano. This will be my first storybook, which I am very excited about.

3. How did you come up with the idea for Work: An Occupational ABC?

I came up with the idea for Work in a very round about way. I was trying to come up with some new pieces for a design show in Toronto called Creative Type and came up with the idea to draw a mountaineer climbing up the side of the letter M. I liked the relationship between the massive heavy letter and the little person interacting with it. I submitted the mountaineer and a butcher slicing a B to the show. From there it only seemed natural to complete the alphabet. Choosing the occupations for each letter was one of the toughest challenges. I wanted the jobs to be visually exciting while steering clear of more “traditional” jobs. Work is something we all have to do and it becomes a large part of our lives. I hope to show kids that there are many career possibilities out there and inspire them to follow a career path they are proud of and can enjoy.

4. What sort of design improvements would you like to see in everyday life?

What I would love to see is a shift in the perception that design is only important for certain clients and applications. Great design is important everywhere. I stumbled across a quote by the designer Art Paul, which I think sums up my feelings on design perfectly. “Good design principles should apply to bubble gum wrappers as well as museum posters.” It’s very unfortunate that good design often is passed off as “too cool” or “too smart” for the average person. The reality is that even if someone can’t tell you why something is well designed, they can feel it. Good design makes the world around us less visually polluted. I think we can all benefit from that.

5. Who are some people that inspire you?

I find inspiration in so many different places. There are many artist and designers that I admire and am inspired by. I am also greatly inspired by sports- football especially. I love stories about unlikely heroes who come up big against all odds. A great example was this past super bowl when a relatively unknown, undrafted player, Malcolm Butler, made a miraculous interception to win the game when it seemed nearly impossible to stop the their opponents, the Seattle Seahawks, from scoring. I am also lucky to have a tight knit group of extremely talented friends who keep me motivated. They are definitely the people that inspire me most.

Judy Kaufmann's playful illustrations caught our eye recently. Immediately, we felt pure joy and urge to play. Judy graciously talked to us about her work.

1. What’s your design philosophy?

Work hard and take it easy at the same time.

2. What projects are you currently working on?

I’m working on the new version of Scenes de Rue Poster, a festival in Mulhouse France about theatre, circus and arts in the street. I’m also illustrating a children book about Chilean indians, working on a logo for a boutique fabric studio and online supplier of beautiful fabrics and woolens based in Michigan and for another logo for a new organic barbershop based in Santiago de Chile.

3. You have said that Barcelona is a wonderful place for illustrators and designers. Why?

I think that this is a city with an amazing quality of life, is small but at the same time is always full of new things, we have sea, the mountain and people from everywhere. The weather is perfect and the best thing is that I can go by bike everywhere. A designer or illustrator need lot of time walking, thinking, visiting friends or museums and this is why Barcelona is so great for us.

4. What sort of design improvements or art would you like to see in everyday life? I’d love to see improvements in bike paths.

5. Who are some people that inspire you?

As I always say, I get the inspiration from what I don’t understand, what I don’t know, what I don’t know how to do, what I am not. From the interest that I feel about all things that are outside of my life. That’s where my imagination picks the inspiration. On the other hand, more than with people, I have a bizarre and explosive inspiration when I go to museums and galleries and I get involved with different colors and formats, whether I like or not what I’m seeing.

Thanks Judy! Looking for more from Judy? Visit her website and shop.

Last week we released a new version of Parable. If you’re not familiar with Parable, it’s like Instagram for thoughts. Few days after the release, we were thrilled to learn that both the Parable iPhone and iPad apps were featured by Apple. The featured version was a culmination of many months of work and incorporated feedback from our users.

Apple loves beautifully designed products that showcase the iOS platform. Here are some of the product decisions that improved the app substantially and likely brought us to the attention of Apple to earn the coveted featured spot.

Simplify Core Functionality  

The original Parable creation experience was clunky. It was clear from feedback that there were usability issues we had to fix.

The screen had major issues;

Font resizing with pinch and zoom was not discoverable.

Key formatting options were crammed together making them difficult to access.

Creating a post required a lot of thought and work.

The buttons are too small.

To address the issues above, we built a set of playful presets. Posting with presets is more intuitive and removes the cognitive overload of too many formatting decisions. Next we broke down the previously concentrated functions and gave them their own real estate. 

As an example, tapping on Alignment leads to this screen. Font, size and color have their own corresponding screens.

We received feedback that photo backgrounds were hard to find. Previously, to select a photo background, the user had to tap the small circled camera located in the top right hand corner. Users simply missed this functionality altogether. Our new photo access is front and center making it difficult to miss.

Customize

We built a custom camera with filters. Apple loves custom functionality because it shows attention to detail and intimate knowledge of their platform. Naturally these are behaviors they like to encourage.

Feeds  -  Surface Relevant Content

To make Parable interesting and relevant we created three different feeds;

- Popular feed represents content that was most liked by the Parable community. - Latest feed serves content by freshness. - Followed feed is from people you follow.

A key aspect of feeds are the built in engagement features. Parable users can like, share or comment on each Parable in the feeds. We made it easier to do all three by making icons for likes, shares and comments bigger. This makes them more touchable. We also surface the latest comment for a richer and more interesting parable consumption experience.

Optimize for all devices

Apple’s recent introduction of new device sizes provides more screen space for apps to shine. From our experience, the incremental development time required to enable this pays off with designs that users love on their big screens. Parable has been optimized to make the best use of all Apple screen sizes. We tested with an array of devices — iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 plus, iPad and iPad mini to ensure that there were no UI glitches.

In addition, the iPad app required custom layouts and orientations to capture all the consumption habits of the big screen — whether on a train or a couch.

Build Delightful Features

Users can share their Parables on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, text and email. To post on Instagram and Pinterest, we used deep linking

We are very proud of the sharing animation. It’s delightful and surprising. Here’s a peek.

Profile — Create a Personal Space

We spruced up the profile by giving it a cleaner look.

We hope you enjoy the brand new Parable! You can try it by downloading here.

Special thanks to Steven Sinofsky, Leo Polovets, Heather Russell, Michael Schechter, Ashita Achuthan and Kieran Wong for all the amazing feedback and support.