For designers, there's a point early in the design process when you just need to put hand to paper and start brainstorming---fast. LayUp, a forthcoming iPad app for Adobe's Creative Cloud, promises to let designers do just that.
Adobe's longstanding marquee applications like InDesign and Illustrator include the requisite tools for creating the finished work. But because both are intended for production-level quality, and require a big screen and a mouse, they're not especially great places to drum up fast and fresh ideas. So when Adobe VP Scott Belsky asked user experience designer (and friend) Khoi Vinh to come in and talk about new tools that could leverage in-the-works technology being created at Adobe, Vinh proposed a new iPad tool that would do just that. Vinh pitched “something like a cross between a sketchbook and a mood board," he explains, "the idea being to really optimize for speed when designers are coming up with ideas, and create an environment where they can get an idea out of their head and on the screen as quickly as possible."
That was about a year ago. Earlier this month, Vinh debuted LayUp at Adobe's MAX 2014 conference (where a suite of new apps for drawing and creating were also announced), and it was a hit. What he cooked up is an app that rapidly turns finger doodling into early stage mock-ups good enough to show to a creative director. The app uses recognition technology to interpret a hastily drawn square and a lopsided circle into a clean shapes that line up on a grid, freeing designers from the minutiae of InDesign so they can jump from one idea to the next.
The app mimics the spontaneity of drawing with pen and paper, but thanks to two important user interface details, it produces more polished results. First, the technology can corral messy sketches into decent-looking layouts that are automatically saved in a timeline feature. This lets designers quickly coast from one idea to the next without toggling around to save drafts, as well as a rearview mirror look at past iterations. Second, Vinh realized early that to make LayUp relevant it would need to communicate with desktop software. Specifically, it can link to photo banks and Typekit accounts so designers can brainstorm with the right photography and fonts in place.
Paper, the iPad sketching app from design outfit FiftyThree, does much of this, and well. But whereas Paper is meant to feel like an ultra-intuitive digital art studio, LayUp supplements an already-existing workflow. "It doesn’t deal in virtual pens and brushes or try to re-create real world art supplies," Vinh says. As he sees it, part of the reason designers haven't had a utilitarian tool like this at their disposal is simply because it falls in a segment of the iPad's capabilities that have largely gone unexplored. "I feel like there’s a huge white space in the iPad market, in taking advantage of its specific capabilities,” Vinh says. “It’s super portable for laying down on a park bench, and it demands a certain kind of simplicity."
Vinh and his team embraced those constraints to create something that's truly iPad-native. As they built Project LayUp, they followed a rule of thumb: When they added a feature, did it help a designer get an idea down faster than they could before? If not, then it got stripped it out of the app. "Why would we need to tap on a menu item to generate a circle,” Vinh says. “Why wouldn’t we draw it?"
This kind of thinking directly dovetails with Adobe's new mission to facilitate more creativity on mobile devices. “There is so little, if any, professional creative work done on mobile, besides photography," Scott Belsky says. "People say, ‘oh you know, maybe creative work will never be on mobile,’ and of course that’s not true. We want every mobile product to have fidelity, so you can create with your fingers at your whim.”
Vinh's insights into the iPad come with an equal appreciation of the barriers to entry in that market. An earlier collage-making app startup of his, Mixel, failed to catch on. And as Vinh notes on his blog Subtraction, declining iPad sales could be a indicator that after four years, consumers still don't know why they need this particular device. “There’s a reason why a lot of really awesome iPad apps have not caught fire," Vinh says. The good news for now is that when LayUp debuts (Belsky says Adobe can't say when that'll happen just yet), it will have the benefit of existing within Adobe's ecosystem of creativity apps.
