Most people that know me are aware that I absolutely love being an art director & designer. Everyday I show up to work, I feel like I’m getting over on society. As I turn on my computer and hear the startup tone, I mutter under my breath, “suckers, I get to do this for another day.” But seriously, I love employing art and the principals of design to engage the human race into whatever I am endeavoring, whether it be an ad, a website or a product design.

In my daily life, I am drawn to good design an user experiences. This inspires my graphic & product designs. The first question I ask when evaluating an execution is “Does this make sense for the actual human being that will be interacting with this”? If not, no matter how elegant or cool the design may be, it doesn’t make the cut.

After years of tagging my BlackBerry emails with “and nobody cares that you have an iPhone” mostly out of envy of my correspondents whose messages were signed “sent from my iPhone”, I paid the money to terminate my Verizon contract and joined the ranks of the technologically elite and purchased an iPhone 3Gs. I was hooked right away. I offered to do the same for my sons and converted them as well (we kept my wife’s Verizon contract intact in case we actually needed to use a phone to place a call).

Having designed products and websites for years, I naturally began thinking about mobile apps. In every endeavor, whether work-related or recreational, I was always looking for an app for that. When I couldn’t find one that suited the task at hand or when the offerings were less-than-inspiring, I would begin to think about what I would want in an app for this pursuit. I began to map out apps in my spare time and then started targeting them toward a purpose On multiple occasions, the end result has been an app for a completely unrelated purpose (see upcoming posts on our new parental-notification app aWareAbouts).

The result has been a complete paradigm (love that word) shift and business model change. For the first time in my professional life, I’m actually producing something I own – selling a product instead of simply generating an invoice for intellectual property and moving on to the next project (don’t get me wrong, I like generating these invoices, especially doing the work along the way). I’m totally stoked to bring these apps into people’s lives that will hopefully enhance their days when they use them.

Now, where’s that dang “Like” button? I’d press it if there were one!