San Diego, California – Pixite LLC announced today the launch of Assembly 1.0, the easiest, most powerful vector design app for the iPhone and iPad. Assembly lets users create beautiful logos, characters, icons and illustrative scenes using professional level tools in a simple package that anyone can design with.
“Many aspiring creatives have trouble making meaningful artwork with the graphic design software out there today,” says Pixite co-founder, Eugene Kaneko. “If you’re a professional or have the time and money, software like Adobe Illustrator is a fantastic tool for design. The downside is it’s complicated and hard to master, because it encompasses so much. We were determined to build an app from the ground up that is both easy enough for design newcomers to master, yet deep enough to become an essential tool for seasoned designers. The outcome is Assembly.”
The key to simplifying the design process and at the same time producing beautiful artwork is Assembly’s unique building block approach to design, a concept refined through the input of professional graphic designers. The Pixite development team observed that the best designers would build basic shapes or templates that were repeated, deleted, and combined to create their final work. Based on this, the team was curious whether providing basic, well-designed shapes can elevate the work that non-designers can produce and also provide a shortcut for professional designers without sacrificing the quality of their work.
Exploring this concept, the team hired a group of talented graphic designers to craft basic shapes that could be used for general design work as well as ones around specific themes like space, nature, animals, floral, robots, and cities. With enough variation in shapes, an infinite number of designs of different styles are possible. With that in mind, Assembly comes installed with over 180 shapes and the option to download many more from inside the app. Work submitted by test users from around the world proved that the building block approach delivered on the promise of better design across the board at any skill level.
One of the challenges to the building block approach was connecting shapes precisely and quickly on the artboard to create a design. In response, the development team built an intelligent snapping system that helps align edges, rotate shapes to certain angles, match sizes of various shapes, and create circular designs, all without being overbearing or hindering the design process.
As Assembly users built more intricate and complex artwork, it became obvious that a multi-select and grouping feature was needed to make changes across multiple shapes, make copies of finished objects, and lock down specific design elements. Taking full advantage of the touch device, Assembly uses a novel yet intuitive hold-down-and-drag gesture, a first among graphic design apps, to multi-select and group shapes.
Another challenging but often ignored aspect to graphic design is choosing the right color combination for each project. Assembly corrects this by providing pre-made color palettes that fit the need of almost any design. More seasoned designers can create an unlimited number of custom color palettes using the color swatch or eye-dropper tool. The quality of work that people are able to produce because of the Assembly color palette system is exceptional.
Designing in Assembly means that anything created in the app can be scaled infinitely without losing image quality. Designs can be blown up to fit an iPhone screen, t-shirt, poster, wall, or even a building. Assembly’s infinitely zooming artboard also means that designs in Assembly can be highly detailed and extremely large. Assembly work can be exported as high-resolution images in JPEG and PNG formats as well as SVG vector format, allowing professionals to open their designs in desktop applications like Adobe Illustrator.
Anticipating that for many, Assembly will become their go-to design tool, the Pixite team has included project management features like project exporting and automatic iCloud syncing and backup. The exporting of projects through email and text messaging lets artists collaborate with others using non-destructive Assembly project files. iCloud syncing allows artists to work on a project on multiple iOS devices and backs up Assembly files automatically so that they never go missing.
The breadth of artwork that Assembly can create is staggering, ranging from black and white lineart that takes advantage of the built-in stroke options to colorful illustrative sceneries using themed shapes and shadows, to abstract geometric designs overlaid on colorful landscape photographs that can be loaded directly onto the artboard. Simple to use yet fully equipped with tools for professional designers, Assembly is poised to democratize the graphic design industry.
“When we handed Assembly to our testers we didn’t know what to expect. We were immediately floored by the work people were sending in. Many of these people had no prior experience in design and yet they were the ones creating the most amazing work. I think that speaks to how exceptional Assembly is,” explains Eugene Kaneko.
Assembly Features
* A building block approach that allows everyone to do graphic design
* Over 180 shapes that can be combined to create an infinite number of unique designs
* More themed shape packs available for download in the in-app store
* Smart snapping for easy shape placement
* Multi-select and grouping for more intricate work
* Copy, flip and rotate shapes and groups
* Fill, stroke, and shadow options
* 20 pre-made color palettes
* Custom color palettes
* Eyedropper color tool
* Load a color or image in the background
* JPEG and PNG output up to 4096×4096 pixels
* Transparent PNG output
* SVG vector output
* Assembly project file output
* Sync projects across devices with iCloud
* Get started with 15 easy-to-follow tutorials
* Continuously updated Inspirations section
Device Requirements
* iPhone, iPad, and iPhone touch
* Requires iOS 8.0 or later
* 62 MB
Pricing and Availability
Assembly is $2.99 (USD) and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Photo and Video category as a Universal App.
Assembly 1.0
Purchase and Download
YouTube Video (Official Trailer)
YouTube Video (Walkthrough)
Media Assets
Located in San Diego, California, Pixite LLC is run by a small team of talented mobile app developers since 2009. Pixite is focused on providing artists and photographers with creative tools that push the boundaries of artistry on mobile devices. Pixite’s apps include: Matter (Previous Editor’s Choice, Free App of the Week), Tangent (App Store Best of 2013, Previous Editor’s Choice), Fragment (#1 in the Top Paid iPad App, Photo and Video category, Free App of the Week, demo app in U.S. Apple Stores) and Union (#1 Top Paid iPad App, Photo and Video category). All Material and Software (C) 2009-2015 Pixite LLC / All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, iPod and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Adobe and Illustrator are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners.