artCircles App for iPad from Art.com and Hot Studio Named "App of the Week"

SAN FRANCISCO, June 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- artCircles, the first iPad app released by Art.com, the world's largest online retailer of posters, prints, and framed art, was recently named the iTunes App Store's "App of the Week." Conceived, designed, built, and branded in collaboration with Hot Studio, an award-winning experience design company, artCircles represents a new and highly engaging way for people to discover and interact with images hand curated from Art.com's massive collection.

Experience lies at the heart of the free artCircles app. Designed exclusively with the iPad in mind, artCircles leverages the iPad's high-resolution display and touchscreen capabilities to provide a unique and innately engrossing art-viewing experience. Anchored by a clever user interface (literally comprised of interrelated circles), the app enables easy discovery, discussion, and sharing. Deep social integration lets users share their favorite works of art with friends, while a Curators circle features hand selected collections from creative leaders like John Maeda and Yves Behar.
Setting goals that included thinking big and bold, the team from Hot Studio leveraged its collective experience on past award-winning apps, like Zinio's iPad magazine reader, to help create a highly interactive, visually stunning application. Hot Studio's visual designers, user experience architects, and technical engineers worked in lockstep throughout the process to design and build an app that fundamentally changed how people could experience Art.com's image collection. Hot collaborated with Art.com on the app's concept and strategy, user experience and interface design, engineering and integration, as well as the naming and visual identity.

"Congratulations to everyone at Art.com," says Rajan Dev, Hot Studio's President. "artCircles leverages Art.com's great catalogue of images in a new way and we're so happy that the app has been so well received.

Be sure to check out the app yourself, and download it from iTunes.

About Art.com, Inc.
With more than 12 million customers in 120 countries worldwide, Art.com Inc. is the world's largest online specialty retailer of high-quality wall art. The company was founded in 1998 with one goal -- to help people find the art they love so they can love their spaces more. Art.com Inc. runs three sites in the USA -- Art.com, AllPosters.com and ArtistRising.com -- and has a strong international presence with 25 local sites in Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and South America. The company offers custom framing and specialty printing, interactive visualization tools to help people find the perfect piece of art for their space and an app for iPad called artCircles, that lets users explore art from a hand-picked selection of curated collections. Art.com, Inc. is a privately held company headquartered in Emeryville, CA, with other facilities in Ohio, North Carolina and the Netherlands. "Art.com" and "artCircles" are trademarks of Art.com, Inc. For more information, visit www.art.com.

About Hot Studio
Envisioning, designing, and deploying innovative experiences since 1997, Hot Studio is an award-winning experience design company with offices in San Francisco and New York City. Dedicated to creating elegant solutions for complex design challenges, we collaborate with business leaders, community organizations, and emerging companies to create breakthrough products and services that have global reach and local impact. For more information visit www.hotstudio.com.

SOURCE Hot Studio