Welcome back to Inside the Design Studio, where we take you behind the scenes and give you a quick glimpse at the app design process! Today, we’ll be teasing DaySince, an upcoming Rocksauce Studios app. We can’t tell you what it does quite yet (but you will soon enough), but after the jump, you can check out the creation of a piece of art — a number, if you want to get specific — in Illustrator. Whether you’re genuinely interested in app design or just want to see hours of work sped up to a brisk 45 seconds, you should definitely hit the jump.

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Sometimes, the process of design is hard to describe or put into words. How exactly do you write an article explaining how you created something cool? You don’t. Instead, you capture the process and share it with the world in video form! We here at Rocksauce Studios have been hard at work on a new group chat app called Trotter (don’t worry, we’ll let you in on all of the cool details soon enough) and I wanted to give you a taste of what it took to create the app’s icon. The entire process took a great deal of hard work in Adobe Illustrator, but you can watch the entire process in less than two minutes after the jump

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(Every Monday, Rocksauce Studios CEO Q Manning will answer your questions about app design, app development and the mobile industry. Submit your questions here!)

What is a whiteboarding session? What happens during one?

A whiteboarding session rarely includes a white board here at Rocksauce, although it certainly used to! It’s a meeting we have two times a week where we get the team together and the sales people bring in all of the ideas that we’ve gotten from clients and present them to the marketing, design and UI/UX guys, as well as our development engineer and our project manager. We look over these potential projects, discuss any other potential ideas that come to us, talk about if we’ve seen this idea in the store and how much competition is out there, whether the client’s approach is the best approach and whether there’s a clever way to help them succeed in the market.
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For people outside of the app design process, User Experience, AKA, how the app controls in the user’s hands, can seem a little nebulous. What is it? How does it work? Why is it important? Here are a few questions solicited from around the Rocksauce Studios office to help you better understand why UX is important and what my job entails.

Why is UX an important process for creating an App? 

UX is not just an important process, it is the most important process! The UX of an application will influence everything from how a user interacts with the final product to the look and feel of the design that artist will take to create final graphics. The UX of a project defines the user flow and functionality of the final product. Without this step, a developer would not know what to build into an application. If an app was a house, the UX would be the house foundation, so to speak.

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One day, we were approached by someone with a connection to Filipino boxing legend Manny Pacquaio who was interested in creating a simple boxing game with the notion that Pacquiao was actively looking to enter the mobile space. The idea here was to sell Pacquaio on the idea with just an image and a pitch. Now. I’m not the most skilled artist ever, but I do work fast. We decided to spend a few hours of our time on a concept piece, with the hope that it would open a dialogue with Pacquaio’s camp to choose us as their app design company.

We were told the game needed to be gritty, with more of an underground feel than an HBO or EA Fight Night feel, but still respectful of the sport. With a time crunch hanging over my head, I got to work.

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Once you’ve finally finished the lengthy, labor-intensive process of designing and building a web application, you are faced with one final, vital decision: how much is this thing going to cost? There are a lot of important factors to consider when you make this decision. Do you want to offer a free “lite” version with the ability to upgrade to a better paid version? Do you want your app to be completely free and powered by (hopefully unobtrusive) advertisements? Plenty of apps are earning dough by being free to purchase, but offering purchases in-app. The ultimate conclusion is that there is no black and white way of deciding what you should charge for your glorious app: you have to know your audience and know what they want. If you know this, you will make the right decision.

Do you have any interest in seeing how eight start-up companies are changing the world for the better? Of course you do and Mashable has a list for your reading pleasure. It’s an excellent piece, even though the noticeable lack of Rocksauce Studios is troubling and damaging to our usually tough ego. Maybe next year?

Hopefully, you’re not too bored and upset by the recent onslaught of posts and pieces about patents and how terrible they are for this entire industry, because here you go. The potentially good news is that Congress will soon vote on new patent legislation that won’t end patent trolling, but will better help the small folks fight back against them. The sooner the better — nothing is crippling creativity and innovation more than all of this stupid patent legislation.

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How important is logo design? It’s so important that even fictional companies in movies need to have distinctive, eye-catching logos. Fauxgo is a website that compiles fake logos as they’re seen in the movies and on television and for anyone with even a passing interest in design, it’s a must-see. What’s especially fun about these is how instantly recognizable they are despite the fact that they don’t exist in the real world and often only appear in one movie (and in the background, at that). That’s a pretty valuable lesson for any aspiring designer out there: make sure people will remember your design forever, even if all they every get is the briefest of glances.

As you peruse the galleries, try to recall the movie and company name before you read the caption…you may be surprised by how often you get it right! We’ve included a few of our favorites after the jump.

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I don’t know about you guys, but I spend significantly more time browsing the web on my smartphone than I do on my computer. I know that I’m not alone. Now that I can catch up on my daily internet perusings at work, at the dentist/veterinarian office or while on the toilet (c’mon, you do it too), why should I waste valuable at-home time sitting in front of my desktop when I could be going outside and socializing in the sunshine or playing Xbox with the blinds closed? The internet has, for lack of a better phrase, gotten easier. It’s no longer an activity we have to plan for; we read our favorite sites here, there and everywhere.

Which is why it’s so incredibly frustrating that so many sites, even popular sites with a ridiculous number of daily readers, are a pain in the butt to read on a mobile device. We have to wonder: Are they not aware that so many people are reading the site on their phone these days? Do they know and not care? Do they not know how to optimize their site so it can be better enjoyed by their steadily rising number of mobile readers?

If it’s the third one, they no longer have an excuse thanks to this excellent article on the subject from Smashing Magazine.

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When I originally assigned Travis the task of writing an article covering an Android user’s opinion of the iOS 5 changes, I was hoping for some playful snark. Instead, he gave us a well written, at times vitriolic, anti-Apple manifesto.

I decided that a counter-point article was needed. After all, Travis may consider Rocksauce Studios an iPhone company, but our first project was The Quick Board, created specifically for Android tablets. Most of our clients want iOS applications, and as that is presently the most successful of app Eco-Systems, we agree with their opinion most of the time.

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, let me say that I am an iOS fan, having been the owner of an iPhone since the aluminum backed model came out. I also have an iPad. My experience with Android devices has typically been those that are underpowered in the hardware sense – the G1, the Archos Home7 and the Motorola Cliq.

These experiences have left me a bit jaded. Travis says this is because the hardware was not up to snuff. My opinion is that these hardware discrepancies are the reason I feel confident in suggesting our clients, particularly those with a fixed budget, start with an iOS device.

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iOS 5? LOL!

A few days ago, you may have noticed there was an Apple event going on. The tech media was, as per usual, tripping all over itself to lap up the new features with its usual sprinkling of the words “magical” and “revolutionary.” But did iOS 5 really change everything…again?

As a long time OS X user, I once watched Apple keynotes waiting to hear about the latest and greatest the computer maker had to offer. Then, I noticed something. For all of Apple’s huffing and puffing about innovation, and even more recently calling out competitors using phrases like “year of the copycats,” many times they were the pot calling the kettle black. Yes, they too stole…er…borrowed ideas from other companies. The difference seems that when Apple borrows, it’s fine, but when others copy ideas from Apple, all the warm fuzzies seem to float away.

Let’s set one thing straight right from the start, all companies borrow, or steal, or assimilate others ideas into their own work.

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