by At some point in the ‘90s, every college dorm had a Magnetic Poetry set stuck to the front of someone’s mini-fridge. Verses might have been limited to the few dozen tiles that hadn’t fallen behind the vent cover, but the fun wasn’t in creating Walt Whitman-worthy masterpieces—it was in seeing how your creation was twisted by other people. Magnetic Poetry eventually went out of fashion, but FridgePoems looks to bring it back. However, while there may be a certain sense of nostalgia evoked here, the digital representation loses quite a bit of the fun without the kitsch and collaboration of the original.
True to its name, FridgePoems’ canvas is a customizable refrigerator door. The relatively small workspace is dwarfed by the giant pasteboard that holds all of the unused words, and finding a specific tile requires a good deal of scrolling and swiping. When we found a word we wanted, however, it instantly responded to our touches, making it easy to cobble phrases together on the screen.
There are several packs of words available to choose from: two are available upon download, four others are unlockable, and the final six are available for purchase. Each time you select a new set, your current project is erased and the words are shuffled, which can be frustrating if you want to build upon what you’ve already created. Part of the fun is in sorting through the various packs, but it quickly gets tedious—a problem that could be remedied by adding the ability to create custom groupings.
FridgePoems encourages sharing snapshots via Twitter or Facebook, but we couldn’t help but wish we could invite our friends to add to our work rather than just reading it. We tried passing our iPad around the office, but it just wasn’t the same without the spontaneous inspiration that struck whenever we had the craving for a midnight snack.
The bottom line. FridgePoems tries to emulate the appeal of Magnetic Poetry, but it just doesn’t have the attractive personality of the original.
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