Mem:o Lets You Keep Track of Things Beautifully

Whether you’re keeping track of your spending, your workouts and calories, or your billable hours, we’re all keeping trying to keep on top of all the data we generate. And if you’re anything like me, you don’t really know where to put that stuff except in some boring spreadsheet that you may or may not ever look at again.

Keeping the ugly out of your data is the job of mem:o—an innovative app for the iPad that will make you want to revisit your data and, who knows, maybe learn something from it.

The great selling point of mem:o is that it’s lovely. Put together by the design firm of c+y, mem:o uses an clean but colorful palette, organizing your personal information into a series of circles of different sizes and colors. You can add tags and text notes for more information and view your data either on a calendar or a board.

It may sound a little confusing to explain, but this way of managing and organizing your data is incredibly intuitive and makes it easy to pick up on patterns and trends at a glance. A lot of big, green circles? You’ve been spending a lot of time on that project. A lot of different colored circles every Friday? Looks like you have a lot going on then.

It’s not just reading your mem:os that’s easy; the user interface is simple to get the hang of, too. You start out by choosing from one of seven color palettes, enter your data, add a unit if you want, add the date and time, and provide any additional notes or tags you think you need. mem:o takes care of the rest, automatically generating an attractive and informative graph that’s also easy to share with your friends through Facebook, Twitter, and email integration.

There’s plenty here too for design nerds. The creators of the app, Caroline Oh and Young Sang Cho, previously designed interactive museum exhibitions and brought that knowledge—along with some basic Dutch design principles and Swiss typography—to make one of the attractive ways of organizing data I’ve seen in a while.

So if you’re tired of your basic bar graphs, give mem:o a try. You can download it for free from the iTunes app store.