Anton Repponen, Urban Walks: «We have set a task to make an interesting city guide on the iPhone»

In the niche of city guides recently introduced a new representative - Urban Walks. It was invented by living in New York designers Anton Repponen and Danil Krivoruchko. We gathered in Moscow's mobile application development studio "Hyperboloid». Urban Walks was bright, beautiful, and it can be considered a benchmark for applications in the genre of city guides. "MakRadar" Anton Repponenom contacted and talked with him about creating Urban Walks.

- Tell us, please, with what you have started work on an application?

- came to me my friend Danil KrivoruchkoWho lives in New York, and offered to make the application. We started with simple prototypes. We count the number of screens in the app, studied online maps, and so on. In the first phase it was important to find a balance between primitive simplicity, that all was clear to the user the first seconds, and the tasks that we set ourselves - to make an interesting city guide on iPhone.

- Why did you choose New York as the first city?

- We've been here a long time live. I - eight years, Daniel - for about three years. I can remember when I first arrived. Information about the city were so many that it was hard to understand what was missing in the first place. I sat in blogs, print out the information and then walked around the city. And New York - a city that you can live in it for 10 years and still every day to learn something new.

- The description of the application there is a phrase: "hand-made trips." What is meant by this?

- This refers to exclusive information. All maps are made by me. Texts written by American journalist John Earl (jonathan Earle). We do not just find interesting stories, and learn about New York a lot. John sat in the library for months in search of interesting information. At first we had a long trip, for 2-3 hours. Then we began to test them, cleaned some point, cut, left the most interesting. The work was carried out very carefully.

- The work of John Earl, you told us, and what is in your working method?

- Before I take my project, I mind it very clearly visualize and prescribe all the details that will be there. Then they can change by 10%, 25%, but rarely when the project becomes completely different. During the work I load the prototypes on the iPhone, something I correct, add or vice versa, tidy. In general, the Urban Walks We did not change much compared to the original idea.

- And what do you mean by the term "interactive design"? Of course, I googled, but I would like to hear from you.

- I would now be Googled himself. :) I work as a designer for many years, I communicate with many customers, and each of them has its own style and design language. In Urban Walks we determine in advance what style we want him to do. We pumped a lot of similar applications and realized that no one else did. After all, nothing revolutionary, we did not. Applications such as Urban Walks, a lot, but it is an approach to the design and to detail has allowed us to stand out. In the words of Daniel Krivoruchko, I want this card, so it can be to look at. She's turned out to be 60%, plans were much more. We would like to specify cafes, restaurants, moving men do, but it turned out to be technically complicated, and we have postponed for later.

- How much time was spent on the creation of applications, and that was the most difficult?

- About a year. But we have not worked on it for eight hours every day. There were breaks. We worked in the evenings, sometimes - at the weekend. If we could work on it full-time, he would have done it in the past month and a half.

- When will the other city or new tour in New York?

- We would like to have had 40 trips to New York. Since New York is not the city, each district is unique. For example, I live Williamsburg. It is an area with a unique history, which is very different from the Upper West Side or Upper East Side, or Chinatown. It is very interesting to talk about each region, because they are all rich in history. Now we want to primarily cover the areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn. For example, we want to do a tour of the northern district of Brooklyn - Greenpoint.

In other cities, it is not a reality. We meet, we communicate with people. Initially, the idea was that the application is easy to customize for any city in the world. We have a CMS to create tours, and everything is done so that if, for example, we find authors in Berlin who want to do things to do, then we are in for a few days, all reconfigured for them. The resulting application for exploring Berlin - Urban Walks Berlin.

- At the conclusion of the conversation... What equipment and software do you use?

- I have two desktops: one - the house, the second - in the studio. Both are huge. I always buy the biggest table that I see in the store. At home I use a MacBook Retina 15, it is connected to a Mac 28 inches. At home I Wacom Intuos5 Pro, I always take it with you. And at work I have a Wacom Large. Of software I mainly use Photoshop and Lightroom, Illustrator sometimes.