Remember the time when not everyone’s social pages, websites and phones looked the same? The time before “skeuomorphic” design was even a thing? The time when no one cared what their hair looked like and when music was actually good? The time when skinny jeans and selfies didn’t exist?
I do. Things were loud back then. We were loud back then. Instead of carefully crafting pixels in Photoshop, we made collages. They were bad. They were awesome. But here’s the thing about nostalgia — no matter how much you romanticise the past, you can’t go back. I can’t go back to pen and paper and I can’t go back to the world where I could only watch what was on the TV. So, let’s bring the past to us. In the form of – you guessed it – an app. While Bazaart can’t bring back the rock ‘n’ roll, it can let us bask in the glory or collages, on our iPhones and iPads.
Bazaart lets you create epic collages on your iOS devices. You can bring in your own photos or borrow some from 500px. The most important part of any self-respecting collage maker’s kit is a good pair of scissors. Bazaart has them – your fingers and some computational magic. Bazaart will also automatically remove the background from pictures. But as this is still early 21st century, it doesn’t always work. You can then take the matters in your own fingers and erase stuff out yourself. This, I’ll admit, is a recipe for hilarity. It’s exactly like trying to cut real paper using your fingers. But that’s ok because even in real life with sharp scissors, I never got the borders right. Which is why all my collages featured people with only one ear.
The text input is a lot more reliable and has everything from classy to funky fonts (and you can buy more via IAP). For all the crazy things Bazaart lets you create, the app itself is fairly minimal. It has the standard flat iOS 7 design with an orange accent. The homepage shows a stream of uploads from people you follow (you’ll follow a set of influential users by default). The controls are laid out nicely at the bottom and change based on your selection.
When you’re browsing through other user’s collages, you can tap on them to view every individual picture used and save it for your own use. Some of the collages on my feed were truly spectacular. I didn’t get anywhere near that. But the process of importing images, not cutting out the background carefully and writing over stuff was surely fun. If you put in the time, and have steadier hands than I do, I’m sure your next collage will be the Instagram envy of many. Bazaart is available for Free on the App Store.