MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, challenged Deep Focus with a big question: how should this leading institution make its first move on what is sure to become one of the most important platforms for fine art: the iPad (or personal tablet) platform? Deep Focus envisioned a simple, elegant, powerful and highly useful application for MoMA. To make a huge entrance into the iPad market, we wanted to create the first highly interactive and socially enabled fine art coffee table book utilizing and celebrating MoMA’s highly-anticipated and quintessential Abstract Expressionist New York exhibit.

MoMA chose Abstract Expressionist New York as the first exhibit for which they would create an iPad experience. Important considerations included how to go beyond marketing and provide a truly useful experience. Deep Focus did extensive interviews with MoMA’s team to determine the best way to create an experience that treated the art with the reverence and respect it deserved. We determined that the app needed to be modern, clean, bold, beautiful, graceful, but it couldn’t be unapproachable, exclusive-feeling, or pretentious; it should be accessible and inviting. We moved quickly from sketching into prototyping so we could test designs first hand. The design team, project stakeholders and people not immediately involved with the project tested app iterations and provided us perspective on our design decisions. We were able to make design updates and see the results almost immediately which helped us to quickly determine what worked and what didn’t. From end to end, concept to design, the app took approximately 6 months. This was the first time social had been integrated into an iPad app in this way.