As a creative, you’re most likely to get hired for a job off the back of your portfolio of past clients and work. Aimed squarely at this market, Moo — the company better known for their business cards — launched Monogram, a free app that aims to help make portfolios more portable.
Using the app, you can create a series of themed portfolios showing off what you do: screenshots of websites, photos, links to websites and a lot more. Monogram is very easy to use, and is one of the more elegant ad hoc presentation apps I’ve seen.
Creating a presentation is easy and straightforward. In addition to images, you can add text, social profiles, links to websites and more. In the process, you are building a rich portfolio/presentation that looks remarkably slick. It can be shared by e-mail, as well, creating an interactive presentation for your potential customers to peruse at their leisure.
“While we love print, we’ve been keen to develop a digital product for our customers,” says Richard Moross, Moo’s CEO. “Monogram seeks to build on the 300-year-old ‘ceremony’ — the time you first meet someone. It seeks to bridge the divide between the humble business card and a more involved website.”
If you have all the images you need on the camera roll on your phone, the app works offline, which is handy for building presentations or pitching to new clients when you’re on the plane or if you do most of your business in a Faraday cage.
The Monogram app follows in the company’s recent tradition of attempting to zap some life into the frankly slightly retro world of business cards. Last year, Moo launched Business Cards+, which are cards embedded with an NFC chip for sharing contact information wirelessly. With Apple’s persistent insistence to refuse supporting NFC, however, the cards never really got off the ground, and I’ve yet to see one in the wild.
The new app also has a somewhat significant oversight: The app doesn’t enable uploading of video content, which means that filmmakers and mime artists will have to go elsewhere for an app to show off their trade. There might be hope, though: Chad Jennings, Moo’s VP of Product and Design, hints that video and GIF support could be coming in the future.
The app is available for iOS now, and Moo says it is “looking at an Android version in the future.”