Pok Pok Playroom is an Apple Design Award Finalist!
Today we received the good news that Pok Pok Playroom is a finalist in the 2021 Apple Design Awards!
We’re a team of perfectionists — a group of people who can spend an entire day discussing the nuanced movement of a person walking, the sound a butterfly makes when it flies, or how it feels to erase a drawing. We’ll do the same when it comes to even the smallest of details, like the individual letter spacing in a word in the Grown-Ups area. You could say we’re sticklers (and you’d be right).
For the past (almost) three years, we’ve been meticulously designing a playroom of toys that kids could feel inspired and empowered by. Now, we’re hard at work developing updates. We care deeply about children’s experiences in the Playroom and spend time crafting a place where they will never get stuck, feel scared or get confused. One that serves them well, helps them learn and of course, sparks their creativity.
Some people have asked us why it’s taken so long to develop, and the answer is simple—everything in the Playroom is handmade. Each animation is hand-drawn (like a flip book), which adds a gentle, almost storybook-like feeling. It took one of our animators over a week to animate the cheetah in the Busy Book (it was over 138 frames and well over 1000 dots that they had to individually draw).
Each of our sounds is hand recorded by our sound designer. He is forever exploring his neighborhood and local thrift stores for objects to record (think soup cans, pinecones and old wooden toys).
Every mechanic is carefully coded by our developers to feel like a toy should—satisfying, juicy, tactile, and fun. It’s a careful process that demands a nuanced touch.
Being nominated for excellence in innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement by Apple is pretty incredible. Even if we don’t win the award on June 10th, we’ve already won so much—we get to hear that kids around the world love Pok Pok Playroom, and that’s priceless.
