Almost three weeks ago, with the help of my brother who just happened to stop by at the right (or wrong perhaps to him) time, my husband and I loaded up our car, tossed the dog in the back and set off on an epic road trip which had us staying in 4 houses and two budget motels in 5 different states on our journey towards New York City. Staying with and seeing our assorted family and friends along the way was awesome and totally worth it, but toward the end of the trip we were all (the dog included) ready to drop our bags somewhere and settle in for a few months.

Two days ago we arrived and after a few initial bumps in the road (our key didn’t work in the apartment door*, the internet didn’t work, etc) and some frantic calls to the girl we’re subletting from, we’re finally in. We’ve unpacked, explored the neighborhood a bit, visited every dog park within a 10-block radius (there are three) and trekked to Chinatown to gather the things we need to make us happy.

Now that everything is in place and we’re more or less comfortable in our new habitat, it’s time to rejoin the real world. We’ve spent the past three weeks not really knowing what day it is. Living in a sort of limbo where we’re sort of paying attention to real life, but mostly not. Tomorrow it’s back to the grind. I’m reluctant – knowing the pile of work that awaits me – but also excited. I get to be in one of the most creatively stimulating places in the world at a time when amazing things are happening for me. It’s pretty heady.

While we’re here, we’re going to be documenting every day of our adventure with a diptych (like the one above). We thought it would be fun to keep a daily record of our days here and it will be neat to see what the other person thought was most interesting about their day – a sort of his and hers view of New York City. If you want to follow along jump over to Hoangzalez** where we’ll be posting our diptychs every evening.

* Our key not working was the result of user error. How embarrassing!

** We’re using our favorite app, instagram for the pictures. If you want to see the outtakes, you can follow me and my husband over there.

I’m about to embark on and epic adventure. Next week my husband and I are packing up the dog, the rice cooker, and the wok and heading to the east coast. After driving up and down the coast to see lots of family, we’ll be settling down in a cute little apartment near the East Village for the next three months.

We’re taking this mini-sabbatical from the midwest so my husband can concentrate on building his new company and because we figured, why the heck not? I’ll be taking a break from freelance while we’re out there to focus on something super awesome that I hope to be able to share soon.

I’m excited for so many things, but first and foremost is that we will be living above a delicious ramen shop. This thrills me to no end because there is no good ramen in this town, I have a feeling we will be eating there more than we should. Of course I’m also excited about the museums, other food, seeing friends and family that live there, but most of all right at this moment, I’m excited for the ramen.

In addition to being psyched for New York, I’m looking forward to the road trip out there. I haven’t done a road trip since I drove to California on Route 66. This won’t be quite as epic as that, but I’m sure it will be awesome.

If you feel like saying bye bye to us, we’ll be hanging out at Psycho Suzi’s on Thursday (Dec 15 – starting around 5:30pm) eating tots and talking about all of the Ramen we’ll be consuming in New York. Stop on by if you can.

Image borrowed from Remedy Quarterly

A few months ago I saw a call for submissions for Remedy Quarterly, a cute little food magazine I’ve been meaning to subscribe to for awhile. The magazine is full of people’s experiences and memories of food and the recipes that go along with them. As someone whose memories all seem to revolve around food it seemed like the perfect place to get my feet wet.

You see, I used to write. When I was younger I would write story after story about the fantastical characters in my head. But somewhere along the way I lost all of that and in recent years the most I’ve written is the occasional blog post. So I sent an email with some blog entries as writing samples, expecting to get rejected. Much to my surprise I got a sweet reply from Kelly, who runs Remedy, saying not only could I write for the magazine, they’d also love it if I illustrated my story as well.

The theme for this issue was Heritage and I wrote about one of the strange holiday traditions in my family, Puerto Rican Christmas. It was a ton of work to get it where I wanted it. When I write, it takes much more focus than when I do other things. I need complete silence and it takes me awhile to find the right “flow”. Eventually, I found it and then I wrote, rewrote, consulted friends, read out loud (and recorded it to play back) all to make sure the cadence of the story sounded right and the feeling I was trying to evoke came through.

In the end, I feel good about where the story ended up and I’m excited to work on another writing project again soon. Making something so different than what I normally do was fun and challenging and definitely worth repeating.

If you’re interested in the magazine, there’s a great preview of issue 7 on the Remedy Blog or, if you just want to dive in, you can get your own copy here.

It’s cold outside so it’s time to start thinking about the holidays (and how to escape to that tropical island once it’s -200 outside) so we’re having a winter-themed show at Big Table Studio. There will be lots of fun posters to see and of course lots of poster-loving folks to hang out with so if you’re in the neighborhood on Friday you should stop by for the opening.

Here are the details:
INKCICLES Winter/Holiday/Anti-Holiday Poster Show
December 2, 7:00 pm–10:00 pm
Big Table Studio
375 Wabasha Street North
Saint Paul, MN 55102

I got my act together this time and managed to get a poster done for a show, so here’s a little peek at my contribution to the holiday show:

Hope to see you there!

It was far easier for me to hit 5,000 than it was for me to hit $100 in revenue I owe the 5,000 mostly to my second app which came out on Oct 16. In fact, all but ~100 of the downloads come from Monster Mash a simple free app I created to experiment with using in-app purchase with a free app (the “freemium” model) to drive downloads while (hopefully) also increasing revenue.

It’s now Nov 2, so it took just 17 days for me to reach 5,000 once I had a free app available. The fact that the app was free certainly jump-started it’s downloads immediately. It was released on a sunday afternoon and had 45 downloads almost instantly, which blew away my previous high of 11 downloads in a day with Dibu’s Monster Maker. While 45 downloads in a day isn’t bad, it wasn’t going to get me to 5,000 in two weeks. I wanted to try experimenting with advertising so before I submitted Monster Mash I integrated it with TapJoy so that I could take advantage of their pay-per-install advertising. I was curious whether I could even attempt to break even on advertising by getting people to unlock the app once they downloaded it.

I had a very modest budget for advertising, just $500 and I blew through it almost instantly. In just 4 days I spent just over $500 and managed to get 1744 2744* downloads of my app. My click-thru rate (saw the ad, clicked on it, decided to download it) was 78.7% which is pretty high. I chalk up my click-thru success to the Monster Mash icon, which I’ll go into more in another post.

I could have gotten to 5,000 downloads in a week if I had more money to burn, since I didn’t I had to get the rest of my downloads organically. Luckily the advertising jolt managed to jump Monster Mash onto the charts and we hit #111 in the US for Kids games on the iPad . Being on the charts helped the app be more visible and get the rest of the 5,000 downloads I was trying to get for this experiment. If we had managed to get even higher on the charts, we would have gotten there even faster.

Did the advertising pay off? The obvious answer to that is no, not directly. As mentioned above I’ve only just made $100 in revenue which means I’m still $400 in the hole. And the money I have made is mostly from downloads of Dibu’s Monster Maker not from people unlocking Monster Mash. (DMM 90% vs MM 10% of revenue)

Still, I’ve seen some interesting ripples from Monster Mash having more visibility. The most interesting ripple seems to be the crossover effect. I have little buttons for each one of my apps within Monster Mash (both the ones I developed and the ones I designed with the Guys in the Booth). When I started running the ad campaign for Monster Mash we noticed a lift in the downloads of Monster Coloring Book. It was not huge but it did appear to be happening and since we were not doing anything to promote it elsewhere, we assumed it was coming from Monster Mash.

I also don’t think I gave myself a very fair experiment to test in-app purchase on. Monster Mash is purposely an incredibly simple app, it was something that I was calling my “weekend project” (although it took slightly longer than a weekend to make). There isn’t much depth or content there and even after unlocking there’s not  a huge amount more you can do. (You get 7 (soon to be 10) more monsters and a button that allows for a bit of monster roulette). So it’s somewhat understandable that people aren’t jumping to unlock it.

While I’ve been disappointed in the unlock performance, this “failure” gives me more experiments to try because now I’m interested in seeing if I can figure out a way to find the tipping point. How much more experience and content do I need to add so that users will want to unlock the content? (or alternatively, is there a different way I can display the unlock area that will make it more attractive?)

I’m also about to release Dibu’s Monster Maker Lite (currently waiting for review) which is a second attempt at playing with in-app purchase where there is more to be gained by purchasing additional content. I’m curious to see whether my results will be different because of that.

Three months ago, when I decided to learn Objective-C so I could get more of an understanding for the mobile space and gain insight on designing for it, I didn’t think I’d be so intrigued, engaged, and excited about what I was doing. But these experiments and what I’ve been able to glean from them have me hooked and I can’t wait for the next one to start.

Related: How I started learning Objective-C, Monster Mash, Dibu’s Monster Maker, Monster Coloring Book

*apparently I can’t add.

I am sitting here, hours later trying to digest this particular event and I can’t let it go. It’s swirling around in my head and won’t go away, so here I am writing because I can’t stop thinking and because right now, I am disturbed, I am sad and I am angry.

I think most days I live in a fantasy land where Dr. King’s speech has come true and we are all equal. But times like tonight slap me in the face and make me wake up to reality and the reality is, that’s just not true. We live in a world where people still decide who you are by the color of your skin and who you choose to love.

When I look at myself in the mirror I see a person, not a color. I have hopes and dreams and flaws just like everyone else. When I look at my husband, I see the same. We may come in different flavors, but that’s not what makes us who we are. What makes us who we are is the experiences we allow to shape us. What we think and how we act.

Those are the things that matter. Everything else is irrelevant.

Let’s Learn How to Draw! has an update in the App store today and it’s a pretty fun one. We’ve added a new module with 5 lessons all about trains.

I love monsters, so the first module was all about cute, growly little creatures. My collaborators, The Guys in the Booth love trains so it just made sense for our second set of drawing lessons to be all about trains.

With this new module you’ll learn how to draw a whole range of train cars including a freight car, an engine and of course, a caboose. Like the monster lessons these ones are broken down into easy to follow steps and each lesson gets progressively harder and after your lesson, you can color your drawing in for more fun.

The train module is a free update for Let’s Learn How to Draw! users so if you’ve already purchased the app, grab the update and start drawing trains!

We’re planning on making more modules available, so if there’s something you’ve been dying to learn how to draw, let us know and it may end up one of the next Let’s Learn How to Draw! lessons.

Get the Update!

Related Links: Let’s Learn How to Draw! Demo, Let’s Learn How to Draw! Website

How I managed to make it up there amongst people I admire, like William Gibson, Jon Hicks and Anil Dash, I don’t know, but wow, what an honor.

Today my newest app, Monster Mash, is available on the app store. It’s a simple little app with a vaguely halloween flavor. Of course the monsters are back and this time around you can slice and dice them for crazy monster mash up fun.

It’s available as a free download with 5 monsters available to slice and dice, if you unlock the app ($.99) you get 7 more  to play with plus an extra special randomizer button. (Have I mentioned how much I love randomizers?)

Of course, if you unlock the app you’ll also get any new monsters that are added in the future as well as my sincere thanks.

Here’s a little look at the whole rowdy cast of characters inside:

Download it, make some weird monster combos and tell me what you think, or better yet leave me some stars on the app store so other people will know that you like it.