For architects and interior designers, creating a mood board or color palette showcasing the materials, furnishings, and finishes proposed for an environment is the fun part. Less fun is the documentation—gathering the cut sheets and specifications to accompany the bid drawing set, and itemizing the final selects into a list for purchasing.
To streamline this process, Morpholio created Ava, a patent-pending tool that complements the New York–based architecture-and-software-development team’s existing Board Pro app (iOS, $2.99 per month, or $14.99 per year). Board Pro turns the tablet into a digital pasteboard for aggregating samples, swatches, and user notes while retaining source URLs and product information in its backend.
Ava (iOS, included with Board Pro subscription), or Automated Visual Assembly, is an new tool that hides the editing toolbars of Board Pro, and organizes the layout into three presentable formats: mood board, cut sheets, and a purchasing lists. Users can toggle between views with one click. “Ava is the connection or glue you wish you had between all your software files—Microsoft Word and Excel, and Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop,” Morpholio co-creator Toru Hasegawa says. These programs currently do not exchange data easily so users have to import and export files, cut and paste data, or recreate information to work among them. “Ava is a multi-verse [as opposed to a universe] that connects and syncs the experiences like it should be,” Hasegawa says.
Though Board’s built-in gallery offers a catalog pre-populated with furnishings and finishes from established and emerging designers and manufacturers—such as Knoll, Herman Miller, Uhuru, and Token—Hasegawa says users can pull in products from any website, including their own Pinterest account through a new integrated portal. “Board Pro automatically creates and keep syncing the content between the three modes of interaction with the data,” he says. “The source of the image can come from anywhere, and you can add your own notes and metadata to supplement the cut sheet.”
With this update, the Morpholio team also leverages the image-editing tools of the Adobe Creative Cloud (CC). Board users can now edit photos directly in Board and export images from the mobile app to the desktop version of Adobe Photoshop CC for advanced tweaks. Board Pro also offers a range of backgrounds and gridlines to help designers lay out their mood boards.
Morpholio’s portfolio of apps for the creative community also includes its namesake digital portfolio app, drawing app Trace, communications platform Crit, and sketching and ideation app Journal.
