Out now: Papercut

Publishing platform app Papercut was released last week with three short stories from publishers Shortfire brought to life with illustration. The iPad app was created by UK-Swedish studio ustwo and is typical of their output: slickly designed, heavily marketed and interesting and flawed in equal parts.

The interesting part is the idea that visual material can appear in response to the reader scrolling through text. As a piece of text scrolls into view it triggers the appearance of other elements on the page. This works well in principal, and is an interesting hint at what magazines might do, but the flaw with this first app is that the text frame – the scroll area that triggers the visuals – is too small. An iPad screen full of text can be too much, but ten lines at a time just isn’t enough. The ratio between visual and verbal is wrongly balanced.

That said, there are some lovely visuals and satisfying animations. See what you think from the video.