Dogzzzz is here!!

A couple of new iMessage sticker packs went live in the App Store today – Dogzzzz Starter Pack and Dogzzzz Anger Management. Dogzzzz was a collaborative effort with my sister who, was the creative inspiration behind it and tirelessly expanded on a great idea.

Dogzzzz are hip, fun, silly and best of all stick! When you can’t find the words, or don’t have the time to type them out, send a Dogzzzz sticker instead.

We had a lot of fun putting this together and hopefully you will have fun using them and sending them to friends.

Not a dog lover, well, there is Catzzzz too. You can find them here.

Stay tuned because there is much, much more to come.

Award-A-Friend Version 1.1

The Award-A-Friend version 1.1 update went live in the App Store today.

The update adds a few new awards – best shopper, best gift and most beautiful. I also did a lot of work to improve the readability of the awards on smaller devices. This meant some font size changes but the biggest adjustment was shortening the ribbon length on all the awards. This change came about after developing the Holiday Edition awards, which have shorter ribbons. I liked the look of the new awards better than the originals. The shorter ribbons made the awards more square, improving their readability and putting the emphasis where it belongs.

I like the new look quite a bit and hope you will too. Stay tuned. There is more to come.

 

Award-A-Friend Holiday Edition

Today I am very proud to announce the App Store debut of my second sticker pack – Award-A-Friend Holiday Edition.

Very early on during the development of a new series of awards for Christmas I figured it was just too many to include in the original sticker pack. This was especially true considering Award-A-Friend already had nearly 50 stickers and I had planned on adding awards for all the important holidays and special days. Adding Christmas stickers would have put the original app over 70 stickers, which, I think is far too many. So, a new app was born.

The first set of awards in the new Holiday Edition are pretty special (I think) because they all contain a new graphic for Christmas. Each one of the graphics I created from scratch and many of them started with paper and pencil. It was a lot of work but I am very pleased with the end product and I hope you will be too.

Coming Soon. Very Soon.

Within days of releasing my first iOS sticker pack app, Award-A-Friend, I was already hard at work on an update. I started by designing an entirely new ribbon from scratch. A few iterations later I had a base ribbon upon which I could start building a whole new series of awards.

Over a couple weeks in to the update I realized that I had so much new material, it didn’t make sense to try and squeeze it in to the original Award-A-Friend app. Instead, I will be releasing an all-new app using the same base concept as the original but the new app will branch out in to other themes.

Much of what I learned creating this new app will be applied to the original Award-A-Friend sticker pack in an upcoming update. This will include redesigned ribbons as well as all new awards.

Stay tuned.

Award-A-Friend

Today, my first ever iOS app, Award-A-Friend, hit the App Store. For me, it was a proud and exciting moment and the culmination of a month’s worth of learning, trial and error, hard work and a whole lot of fun.

My inspiration for an iMessage sticker app came from an article on The Verge. I came up with the idea for “Award-A-Friend” shortly after reading the article but I really didn’t have the tools or skills to make it a reality. I downloaded a trial version of Affinity Designer and set out to learn the software well enough to make a prototype design.

It didn’t take long to produce a decent ribbon and prove the concept and with that, I purchased a copy of Affinity Designer and set about making ribbons. Even though I had a basic design, ribbons went through many iterations of polish before I was satisfied. Some of the more elaborate ribbons required additional elements that I designed from scratch and a few of those started with pencil and paper.

In the following weeks, I polished the design, tested, fixed, added ribbons, eliminated ribbons and tested again and again until I was happy with the finished product.

For sure there have been frustrating moments along the way but overall it has been a terrific experience and I am already working on an update.

A Beginning…

I am very excited to kick off my new “projects” site. This is coming only days before releasing my first project, an effort that has taken over a month of learning, trying, failing  and experimenting to put together a finished product. I am both nervous and anxious but mostly just happy that I saw it through to the end. More to come…