Josh: We have two giant walls painted in whiteboard paint. When we're trying to design a flow, whether it's on the iPhone or on the Web, the whiteboard marker just comes out. It's all very rough and very raw, and after we have an idea of what's going on, we get to pixels pretty fast.
I do a good bit of the design work, and I'm an Illustrator junkie. You'll find a lot of Web designers who swear by Photoshop, but for me, I do all my design in Illustrator. The vast majority of the artwork you see coming out of here is coming from Illustrator just because it allows a remarkable level of pixel precision. So we develop the broad strokes of the visuals in Illustrator—the colors, the button shapes, the overall style. Once those are set in place, we set design mockups aside and focus instead on the code.
Figure 2-6. Icons are Gowalla's primary visual building block as well as the app's currency. Icon design moves quickly from sketch to pixel as shown in these Gowalla icons of a GPS device and a tent. To keep the production line moving, the team collaborates with Iconfactory, the company that produces about a third of Gowalla's icons. Icons: David Lanham, Iconfactory.