Curator - visual thinking from Curator & Co on Vimeo.

Ah, curation. The nebulous act of mindful collection once the reserve of high-minded institutions is now a buzzword used liberally for choosing and organising of any sort. Zeitgeist-y semantics aside, we all need to do quite a bit of sorting and organising these days – call it what you will, sifting through gluts of noise and information can be downright daunting. Enter Curator, the refreshingly straightforward new iOS app that makes gathering images into crisp mood boards significantly more intuitive than it has perhaps ever been.

Operating something like a simplified Pinterest-on-the-fly, the handsome tool looks to be a minor godsend for any working creative who might need to quickly communicate an idea more effectively than might be possible with a sketch or words. With direct links to any number of sources – Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, etc. – users are able to aggregate found images into clear ideas with minimal effort. And Curator doubles as a powerful presentation tool, eliminating the need for a separate app to show off your vision.

Curator is yet another step in a trend towards radical simplification we’ve been keeping an eye on, in which application and interfaces reduce a given function to its essence to make for powerful, no-fuss tools. The minimalist (and laconic) news platform Circa has grown dramatically over the past few months, and on the feed we’ve recently seen the likes Offiline, which whittles your daily consumable content down to one quality hour, as well as Durr, a haptic watch with no hands to guide users in  maximising the usable time in their days.