Gourmet Live

We helped Condé Nast revitalize their beloved retired magazine Gourmet Live in the form of an immersive iPad app, released just after iPad hit stores for the first time. Gourmet Live featured fullscreen photography and articles, an enormous back catalogue of content rewarded through activity achievements or purchasable through IAP. In December 2010, Apple featured Gourmet Live in Apple Stores nationwide, on giant iPad displays for the holiday shopping season. In November of the following year, Gourmet Live won the Advertising Age Media Vanguard Award for Best Digital Brand Revival.

Yelp for iPad

After the enormous success of Gourmet Live, Yelp tapped Karbon to design a new version specifially for the larger iPad screen. We worked closely with their in-house design team to bring the familiar Yelp design language to iPad and created a foundation for future design iteration on the platform.

Uncrate & Devour

Uncrate brought in Karbon to design and develop native iOS apps for their two immensely popular websites, with additional features like search and stashing products and videos for later. In 2014, Tom Hanks called Uncrate one of two apps on iOS he “couldn't live without”.

ING Direct

The ground-breaking internet-only bank ING Direct hired Karbon to design a skeuomorphic iPad app to empower customers to balance their accounts and pay bills electronically, including scheduling bill payments and a fun check-writing interface that included signing with your finger. While Karbon completed design work, ING Direct was acquired by Capital One before this project could be developed.

Karoo

Care.com brought Karbon in to design and develop an app for their enormously popular platform. Focused on sharing photos, videos, locations and milestones, Karoo was one of the first apps in the App Store that created a private space to share meaningful moments between families and caregivers. In 2013, Karoo was a Webby Award honoree.

Google Drive for iOS

Karbon designed and co-developed Google Drive for iOS. One of the most popular and widely-used Google iOS apps today, Karbon was solely responsible for the initial user interface design of the product on iOS. We then worked alongside the growing Google team for an additional two years adding major features, including real-time editing, collaboration and printing, and in-app purchase for larger storage plans, all while refining the interface design aligned with multiple Google-wide initiatives.

Google Docs, Google Sheets, & Google Slides

Before the conclusion of our multi-year partnership with the amazing Google Drive team, we helped transition the app interface to Material Design and then split off focused apps for the three main features of Google's online collaboration suite.

Scratch

As iOS matured, we felt a strong need for a quick-input notepad to jot down our daily ideas, so we released our first Karbon-branded app, Scratch. With Dropbox sync, share integration to many third-party apps, a customizable Markdown toolbar and a delightfully simple and fast user interface, Scratch was a beloved utility for many users until we retired the product in late 2015.

iLike powered by Myspace

A revitalized Myspace hired Karbon to design a brand-new music app for their service iLike. Karbon created a cross-platform user interface for iOS and Android, including playlist management, music exploration, and the fullscreen and mini player experience. We then worked with Myspace to oversee development of the initial cross-platform MVP. Unfortunately, this project never saw wide release.

American Express: Platinum Connect

We worked with American Express to design and prototype a concierge app for their Platinum customers. In addition to reservations, lounge maps and other amenity features, Platinum Connect offered an exclusive live chat for cardmembers. These concepts were later landed into various areas of the official American Express app.

Google One Today

Karbon had the privilege of working with Google.org to overhaul and improve One Today for iOS, a product that brought together people and nonprofits with the goal of donating $1 a day. One Today also allowed users to create donation matching for their friends, increasing their impact. Karbon rewrote the app from the ground up, then helped transition its interface to Material Design, while improving the donation flow to greatly increase the number of daily donations.

GrowthKit for Google Apps

A group of internal teams at Google hired Karbon to architect, design and develop a framework called GrowthKit to help users of Google's iOS products set logical default app handlers for common actions (such as opening links, sending email, and mapping an address). GrowthKit also helped Google promote relevant related products to existing users. Karbon spent a year creating the framework, then the subsequent year integrating it into all major Google iOS products, landing code in Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate, Google Calendar and more.

Twitter Q&A

After running several large-scale q&a sessions manually with celebrities, Twitter realized they needed a purpose-made custom iOS app to improve the experience for their VITs (Very Important Tweeters), so they tasked Karbon with designing and developing Twitter Q&A. Utilizing the Twitter API, as well as custom video processing and overlays, TQA made it easy for anyone to run a live session with their fans to answer questions via text or video. At the end of the event, the app would also tally statistics automatically (including questions received, new followers, and answers favorited). Over the course of several years, Twitter Q&A was used by many celebrities and politicians, including One Direction, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and others.

Science Journal

One of our most rewarding projects, Google Making & Science brought Karbon in to create an iOS version of their Android app, Science Journal, which allowed anyone to gather data about the world around them by harnessing the sensors in their device and connected Bluetooth hardware like Arduino. The app featured live charting, recording and playback of data from sensors like the accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer and more, as well as a suite of notetaking features including attaching photos and videos. Projects could also be shared with other users, and synced to Google Drive. Science Journal was made open source in 2019, and sold to Arduino in 2020.

Google Meet

As part of a major overhaul of Gmail, Google Chat and video conferencing features, Google hired Karbon to help rebuild Google Meet from the ground up for use in Google Workspace, their then-new initiative to bring communication and productivity apps under a single banner. Karbon helped rewrite Google Meet, then spent a year adding new features and integrating it into Gmail for iOS. Karbon was responsible for the in-call experience and related features, including live chat, the video interface engine and various in-call participant layouts.

Our work on this product proved especially important during the global Covid-19 pandemic when usage of Google Meet was at an all-time high as work and school went fully remote worldwide. Google Meet is available on the App Store and included in Gmail.