The Online Magazine Focused on App Design, Branding & Marketing

The Apps: Treasure Kai and the Lost Gold of Shark Island & Treasure Kai and the Seven Cities of Gold

The Device: iPad

Price: $3.99 and $4.99

We had a blast with the Treasure Bound Books! There’s a reason why they’re award winning and top rated apps on the iTunes store. They’re imaginative, interactive and entertaining!

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(When a new person joins the Rocksauce Studios family, we try to make them as comfortable as possible…by throwing a series of questions at them! Today, meet our newest designer: RJ Nye.)

Tell us more about your art and design background and what made you become an artist and designer?

–I’ve always been interested in art since I was a kid. I think I even wanted to be a cartoonist at one point. But as I progressed through my teens, my passion for art faded until I was introduced to Photoshop by a friend. We were both video gamers and loved to recreate art from our favorite games. At one point, we had even created a webcomic that mimicked the popular Penny Arcade series. It was really, really awful. Fortunately it let me become more familiar with how the software worked. Around that same time I began to create designs for a band that my friends had put together. It was my first introduction into creating communicative art, or at least something more practical than fan art of Final Fantasy characters. The entire process of creating conscious, smart design clicked for me and I haven’t looked back since.

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Sometimes, a client will come to Rocksauce Studios with a great app idea that’s just too big to work. Everyone tends to let their imagination run away with them a bit. When you have an idea, it’s very easy to let that idea grow. When that idea simply lives in your head without any real world constraints, budget or time frame attached to it, it’s easy to let it spiral out of control.

While plenty of people come to us with the seed of an idea that we help cultivate and transform, others come to us with a fully formed idea. For those who come to us with a seed, we can put up some gates and carefully guide them to success. As for the second group…well, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve said: “That feature is cool, but it’s not the best idea for right now.” When it comes to apps, simpler is always better. At least at the start.

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What are your hopes for the iPhone 5?

I’m hoping for a larger screen. That’ll be nice. I already have iOS 6 on my iPhone 4, so I highly doubt there’ll be anything new like that to look forward to. I would love the ability to double tap the home button and have a brightness control like you do on the iPad, where it will bring up the little drawer where you can make adjustments. You can’t do that on an iPhone yet! I am concerned about the purported new adapter since that means all of our iPhone accessories will have to be re-bought, but a faster processor and a larger screen will help me forget about that.

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As a designer, I consider myself pretty laid back. I’m willing to roll with whatever punches are thrown at me. However, there are a handful of things that just plain bug me. Here are my top five, presented in a helpful list format for your education.

1. “Make It Pop!”

You have no idea how many times I’ve been on a project and I’ve been asked to “make it pop.” It’s an ambiguous term. There’s nothing descriptive about it, unfortunately. It’s a word that people may have heard and they’ve found a way to work into their vocabulary, but it means nothing to me. I rarely ask for an explanation for it, because I know what they mean. Saying “make it pop” is typically another way of saying “make it look fantastic.” Luckily, that was our plan in the first place!

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

Can you describe a healthy customer relationship? An unhealthy one? 

A healthy customer relationship at Rocksauce Studios is one where we’re both mutually beneficial, both respectful of each other’s ideas and one where we are deferred to as the expert in what we’re good at, which is app design and mobile development. The customer is looked at as the owner and master in regards to their own industry (which the app is built to work with and for, of course). A good client will give us the feedback we need right away and let us know any specific details that we need to know about the project. For example, if we were designing an app for pilots, they’d supply us with information about FAA regulations, where to find certain documentation and what rules there are and what rules there aren’t.

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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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My name is Peter Yoder and I’m a COO.

That’s Chief Operating Officer if you’re not familiar with business jargon. My job at Rocksauce Studios can be summed up rather succinctly: I make everything run.

Naturally, there are qualifiers to that statement. I have to make everything run smoothly. I have to make everything run on time. Most importantly, I have to keep everything running smoothly and on time while making sure that our apps are the absolute best in the market (but I’m biased). That may sound like an obvious statement, but it’s not always easy when you’re trying to manage a team of designers and creative types!

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I am always amazed at how many people want to create a piece of software with absolutely no clue how software development works. Luckily, there are great people out there who can educate them along the way. We call it “software” for a reason. Software is intangible, unknowable, and incredibly subjective…something some people perpetually fail to understand. Software is art. You must approach software development as if you are commissioning a work of art.

The best developer I know used to be a pianist. I asked him how difficult it was to make the transition between playing the piano and writing code. His response was, “There was no transition. It’s exactly the same thing.” Let that statement enlighten you.

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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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