Excavating the secrets, scandals, and untold stories hiding below the surface of life, and giving voice to the characters who make or made those hiStories happen.
In addition to the work of the author, illustrator and program developer, you may also need a UX (user experience) designer or a game mechanics expert, depending on the features and navigation you wish to include in your app. If you're developing for children, you may need the help of an educational consultant to ensure that your content is appropriate for the development age and/or to create related curricular materials. And if you don't have a mechanism in place to market your app, you will, most assuredly, need a publicist as well.
But the one person you can absolutely not live without is your Art Director.
I'll never forget the moment when I realized just how true this is. I developed Beware Madame La Guillotine on a shoestring, as you know, and therefore hoped to get away with using Apple's palette of preset buttons, icons and other graphic elements. But when my programmer sent me the initial mock ups, I couldn't believe my eyes.
Several "u" words came immediately to mind: unbecoming, undesirable, uninteresting, and unpromising were among them. But the word that really screamed in my ears was "ugly". It was not unique. It looked like most of other apps in the App Store.
In walked Beth Lower, graphic artist extraordinaire. Beth is an acclaimed Art Director, well known in the magazine world. She came to my StoryApp eager to learn all she could about app development and ready to apply her already proven graphic design skills to the digital environment.
We still had to cut corners from a financial point of view. We used Apple presets in the static content of the nav and tool bars, for example. But all dynamic content in the body of the app, such buttons, text layout, illustration set up, graphic icons and maps -- you name it -- were realized thanks to Beth's artistic eye and creative contribution. I look very forward to collaborating with her again.
