Head on over to the Duck Duck Moose Facebook page and give us a like to download our weekly coloring pages. All you need is a printer and a little artist!

At long last, we’ve launched Wheels on the Bus on Android. I know, I know, took us a bit, but we promised and delivered (we are only 4 people after all)! For those Android enthusiasts you can check out Wheels on the Bus on the Android Market

‘Wheels on the Bus’ by Duck Duck Moose is a fun, interactive musical book, based on the popular children’s song. Come aboard the bus to spin the wheels, open and close the doors, swish the wipers, pop some bubbles, make a dog bark, and much more!

Some of the recognition we have been privileged to receive:

• 2010 Parents’ Choice Gold Award winner – Parents’ Choice Foundation
• Winner of “Best Children’s App” KAPi Award – 2010 International CES
• Editor’s Choice Award for Excellence in Design – Children’s Technology Review
• A Top 10 Educational App on the Apple AppStore since January 2009
• Featured in Steve Jobs’ Keynote address announcing the launch of the iPad 2
• Featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, MSNBC, Wired

Check out the Wheels on the Bus app on the Android Market

In addition, we have lots of cool stuff going on at Duck Duck Moose, including the launch of our very first music album (!!!!) Duck Duck Music: Favorite Children’s Songs, more apps coming for Android and two more apps for iOS in production.

I have been trying to carve out a little time for nesting projects, but with a 6 month old and 2 apps in production at Duck Duck Moose, there never seems to be enough time. Here are a few recent projects I have worked on around the house.

“I love you because”
I saw this idea on Pinterest and figured everyone can use a little bit of love and positive energy.

Lamp Makeover
An old lamp gets a new life courtesy of some paper and a scrap booking element.

Painting a painting
I love this painting from Urban Outfitters, but when I got it, I was disappointed with the colors. I decided to add some color of my own and now it brightens up my daughter’s playroom.

Tree and Hearth
A metal tree from Urban Outfitters hangs over our fireplace right next to a hand built, pit-fired pot – one of the many I have collected on trips to the South West.

Colorful Reading
A while ago an interior designer friend of mine suggested I arrange the books in my living room by color. What a difference it made! After I did the arranging, I found that I often remembered my books by color anyway which made them easier to find.

Faux animal heads
I know these have had their day and then quite a few days after that, but I confess, I still love them. This was another great find from Urban Outfitters. The paper and frame were my additions. I feel like there are endless possibilities for adornment come the holidays.

Welcome home
My little lantern from Flora Grubb has seen better days, but paired with some mini pine cones and a bright ribbon, it is kind of a sweet welcome for guests.

Wall statement
On the wall of my office. It is hanging above a settee I found in the trash that *some day* I *will* recover.

More for the walls
I finally put up some photos of our travels. I found great instructions on Ballard Designs website on how to hang these without making swiss cheese out of my walls.

Plants that don’t die
Believe me, that’s saying a lot because I work hard to kill them.

Product Manager
We added a new PM to our team!

In case you haven’t gleaned from the previous post (and the silence) we have a new product manager on board at Duck Duck Moose! In all my abundant free time I have been fully absorbed in sleeping (turns out nothing sounds more attractive to me than an extra 5 minutes of sleep these days) and decorating spaces for kids (if anyone would like to volunteer their kid’s space for a make-over I am your woman). A few months ago I saw these cute posters for kids from Land of Nod. They aren’t exactly my style, so I decided to make some of my own for little G’s bathroom.




I am going to endeavor to blog a little more often now that I have finally caught my breath, but in the meantime be on the lookout for another app from Duck Duck Moose (coming soon) and check out our pins on Pinterest

Our new little soon-to-be product manager’s nursery was featured on the Dwell blog this morning featuring their new Thompson Glider in the Chocolate Dot fabric. With 3-4 more weeks until her arrival, this little one is DDM’s longest development cycle to-date.

We just realized it has been two whole years since we started Duck Duck Moose — time sure does fly! When we take stock of all that has happened in the past two years, we can hardly believe it — 6 iPhone apps, 4 iPad apps, 2 years (and a partridge in a pear tree). Our kids have gotten older (and more sophisticated as product managers) and we are about to welcome one new little project manager to the fold, due in March. We are so thankful for all the recognition, feedback and love we have received from fellow app developers and customers. Please keep it coming — we love hearing from you!

To celebrate our 2 year anniversary, we wanted to do something to celebrate (other than eat massive amounts of chocolate cake — mostly to be consumed by the pregnant duck), so we decided to offer Baa Baa Black Sheep at 50% off for a limited time!

This educational puzzle app includes two popular nursery rhymes: Baa Baa Black Sheep and Row Your boat. Explore the island of Baa Baa, where you can row-row your boat, see Baa Baa and his friends, and explore 3 underwater worlds, all while looking for matching puzzle pieces hidden throughout the island!

Download from iTunes

The best part of this wild ride has been working with children. We are constantly amazed by the little ones and how quickly they learn and discover new things. Check out a little video that we put together of children using our apps.

Happy Holidays!
Caroline, Michael, & Nicci

  we are honored and thrilled to announce that we won iLounge.com 2010 iPod/iPhone Kids’ App of the Year Award for our app Park Math!

Park Math introduces early math concepts to children in Preschool and Kindergarten (ages 1-6). With 7 fun educational activities, Park Math teaches counting, addition, subtraction, sorting and more as children play with Blue Bear and his friends in a park. The music arranged and recorded especially for this app is performed by cello and guitar. Park Math includes two levels for Preschool and Kindergarten. Level 1 includes counting up to 20 and addition/subtraction with numbers up to 5. Level 2 includes counting up to 50 and addition/subtraction with numbers up to 10. The iPad version, Park Math HD, will be released shortly, and will include a third level for First Grade with counting up to 100 and addition/subtraction with numbers up to 20.

We would like to thank Jeremy Horwitz, Editor-in-Chief of iLounge.com. We are so honored to be selected for this prestigious award!

Get Park Math on iTunes

Of the many developers now producing apps for children, Duck Duck Moose has repeatedly stood out because of the excellence of its art, music, and kid-friendly interfaces. Park Math builds upon all of the company’s past titles, teaching basic counting, addition, subtraction, and related skills in a manner that’s gentle and polished enough for young children to enjoy. Who knew that math could be so fun?”
– Jeremy Horwitz, Editor-in-Chief of iLounge

am a fan of silly holiday traditions. I love to carve pumpkins, dress up for Halloween, dye eggs, decorate Christmas trees, so as you can imagine, I jumped on the chance to carve a pumpkin for the App-o-Lantern pumpkin carving contest. (PSSST, by the way the top prize is an Apple TV! Check out the contest rules for more info)

Some of my favorite pumpkins designs are those that make use of a shaving technique to allow light to pass through certain portions of the pumpkin. Our pumpkin was Duck Duck Moose themed, but in case you are looking for something more traditional, here are some ideas and techniques to get you started.

Marthastewart.com is always a great place to start your search. Each year they post innovative pumpkin designs along with great how-tos. There are a host of tools that can make carving easier, for example:

• A sharp knife or bread knife (for cutting a hole to hollow out your pumpkin)
• A linoleum cutter (for shaving off sections to allow light to pass through your pumpkin
• Miniature saws (for smaller cuts)
• Power drills (for small holes)
• Needle tool – found in most ceramic tool kits in an art supply store (for punching holes to mark a pattern)
  mellon baller (for gouging out large round holes)
• Cookie cutters

My tool kit was pretty sparse — I used a bread knife, paring knife, acrylic paints and some paint brushes.

Design ideas

From Martha Stewart (many of the templates for these and how-to’s can be found on marthastewart.com)

Other favorites from around the web








Pumpkin seed recipe
1. Rinse out the seeds with water (I did this in a colander) and pick out the pulp and strings
2. Coat seeds with a tbs of oil (I used meyer lemon oil for mine, but olive works fine)
3. Sprinkle seeds with salt or other flavors (this year I coated mine with chili powder and salt, but in the past have used lemon zest, herbes de provence and cayenne)
4. bake seeds at 325 until crisp

Happy Halloween!
Duck Duck Moose

love Wordpress. Love it. Did I mention I LOVE Wordpress? The brilliance of Wordpress is how incredibly easy it is to get it up and running, how customizable it is with a modicum of programming knowledge, and now with a surplus of well-designed themes you can easily create a blog that looks great too. One of my favorite things to do is to start with a base template and modify according to my taste. I only do this for personal blogs of which I have many. I could probably feed a small country on what I spend per year on domain registration.

Anywho.

Today I added yet another domain to my collection and as I was looking for a great base template to start with it occurred to me to share some of the good ones I have found for those of you looking for inspiration or just a good base theme to start with.

Design Disease has some lovely colorful templates which can be used out of the box or customized. They also have premium paid templates, but the free ones are pretty solid. I particularly like this one.

Gigantic is a nice clean theme with decent type. This is the one I ended up going with. Download here

Irresistible – a lovely theme in my favorite color. Download here
WooThemes has other nice free themes here.

Color Paper — A well designed theme. Download theme

Design Pile for Smashing Magazine
Download

Magazeen Download Theme

Titan: a lovely, simple theme

If none of these themes is your style or you are looking for a specific style a great place to start is Smashing Magazine. The folks at Smashing have been kind enough to curate several galleries of themes. Here are a few to get you started:

• 100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes
• 100 Free Wordpress Themes for 2009
• 83 WordPress Themes you probably haven’t seen
  

Here are a few guidelines for ensuring a successful Wordpress install:

• Always look at the demo of the theme, not just a screen capture.

  I often find that themes look very different in the live demos than they do in screen captures. A live demo will give you an idea of what the theme will look like when it is installed on your website and also help you to catch any cross browser display issues. Many themes are created by independent designers who originally designed them for their websites or who may have stopped supporting them, so it is good to check stability first.

• Read the designer’s notes

  Many designers post installation and other notes on their themes. Installation is usually standard, but these notes may help you customize, learn how to install supplemental plugins and fix small issues.

• Change the write permissions of your headers files on older versions of Wordpress

  I found this one out the hard way when my installation was hacked and my server shut off my website. Lock it down, baby.

• Make sure your new installation plays nice with your old installation

  If you have an old template in play with lots of content, it is a good idea to make sure things translate over smoothly. The newest versions of Wordpress have a theme viewer that will let you see what the first page of your content looks like before you activate a theme — this can give you a good idea of what might break. Another option is to install the new theme on a dupe of your website and move it over when you are satisfied. This, however, takes a little more work and since I like to live dangerously, I usually just do my switching late at night.

• Try and keep it similar

  If you aren’t big into coding, the best thing to do is pick a template that is similar in layout to what you would like your final theme to look like. Font sizes, Font colors and image banners can be easily swapped, but when you start doing heavy construction you find yourself knee-deep in someone else’s code which can leave you feeling like it might have been easier to start from scratch.

• Rely on plugins

  Plugins are incredible and you can usually find a plugin for everything that you want to do – why reinvent the wheel? If your theme doesn’t have a feature you would like, say tag clouds, rest assured you can find a plugin for it.

Now go forth and create.

They Draw and Cook:
My favorite this week is “They Draw and Cook” a website dedicated to a love of food and illustration. I especially love this recipe for ‘Wicked Pissah Corn Chowder’. I originally hail from Boston and having had to cull phrases like “cool beans” and “wicked pissah” from my vocabulary it makes me feel oddly at ease.

via: SallyTV

GIGI Press:
As a designer, I have a love of everything letterpress, which is only bested by my love of the mid-century modern, so imagine the squealing that ensued when I received an email from Jillian Bos at Gigi Press announcing her new Eames rocker thank you notes. I also love that all of her stationary is printed on tree-free cotton paper with soy inks. Check out the Gigi Press shop here for more beautiful design and typography.

Long and Leafy Scarf:
I want this.

ModCloth:
Stylistically similar to Anthropologie at more reasonable prices. I love this dress.

Frida Kahlo Homage:
These painting of Frida Kahlo by Tascha are beautiful — so vibrant.

Mommy Wants Vodka:
A hilarious and irreverent read.

Pom pom sack hat:
Ridiculous? Yes. Potential future humiliation? You betcha! But also undeniably adorable. Who doesn’t need a Pom pom sack hat, I ask you?

Flora Grubb:
This summer I am going all earth mother and stuff — I have planted a very large (and out of control) almost entirely eaten by pests, garden in my back yard. Every day I go out there and lament the fact that it doesn’t conform to the picture in my mind’s eye of what any perfect garden should look like (i.e. pretty much anything in a Martha Stewart catalog). For a perfect slice of heaven on earth, I only have to wander to the Flora Grubb gardens in San Francisco, which is a charming place for rare plants, aesthetically pleasing garden tools and eco plant art.

La Tartine Gourmande:
I am obsessed with this women. She probably knows since I have written her scores of emails drooling all over her fantastic and edible works of art. I first discovered her on Flickr and have since been an ardent follower of her blog. I often make one or two of her recipes for dinner parties.

Beet Salad with Goat Cheese and Mache

Lemon-thyme canoli

love Ramen.

Why Ramen, you ask? Probably because I have eaten it for lunch every day this week (so far) and am likely to have it for lunch tomorrow. Among its many other amiable qualities, the most wonderful is that this .99 food can be made in under 3 minutes. And it is salty. Did I mention it can be made in under 3 minutes?

Despite my current obsession with Ramen, I actually really do enjoy cooking. In fact, I have a long-standing love affair with cooking. I remember begging my Grandfather for the Easy Bake oven when I was 6 years old and when I received it, spending countless hours cooking many delectable treats (such as peanut butter and chocolate on a saltine) in the mini plastic (PBA leaching?) tray under a 100 Watt light bulb. The rest of my time was spent trying to convince people around me to sample my creations (good thing I had a younger brother). Needless to say, my taste for the epicurean has gone slightly more upscale since then.

The French Laundry is an uber fancy-pants restaurant north of San Francisco, in Napa Valley. It’s food and presentation is the stuff of myths. I have never been there, but I once knew someone, who knew someone that had cousin that went there and he said it was amazing — worth every penny (that I don’t know about, but I am reasonably sure a lot of pennies were involved).

The closest I have ever gotten to the French Laundry is owning the French Laundry cookbook — which is a thing to behold in and of itself. It has beautiful pictures, perfect typography and deceptively simple seeming recipes. It was the latter that caused my husband and I to think it would be a great idea to host a French Laundry dinner party for the holidays. This is one of those ideas that seemed brilliant at the time, to be sure.

As it closed in on Wednesday of the week of the dinner party (which was on Saturday) I began to get just the tiniest bit stressed (who me?). The list of items I needed to buy for my kitchen in order to prep the food was almost as long as the food list: a mandoline (OK, I actually wanted one of those bad boys anyway), an egg cutter (not so much, but OK), a tami (?), 2 silpats (?? WHA?), a chinois (???)…anyway, you get the point.

I decided that I needed to make my life absolutely as miserable as possible, by also arranging all the flowers for the event. This was a critical error on my part. Three days before I made a trip to the SF Flower Mart to pick up flowers and to Whole Foods and Trader Joes and Bell and Trunk and then back to Whole Foods and then one more time to Trader Joes. At one point my kitchen looked like a flower battle ground with stems and leaves everywhere and piles and piles of flowers on the counter. I was standing amongst the piles, my hair in disarray, hyperventilating because things were wilting faster than I could arrange them and because it is hard work to protect a pile of flowers from an onslaught of hungry cats who firmly believe it is their right to eat everything green (and then barf it on my white carpet).

Cooking started two days before the actual day of the meal. Each recipe had so many constituents and all of them needed to be simmered, chilled, set and beaten into submission in advance. The smartest thing I did was make an hour by hour task list of everything that needed to be completed from 7:30 AM right up until we served the last course of the meal…at 11PM.

Other than the general craziness most everything went pretty smoothly. My huz had the brilliant idea to take our menu to a local wine shop and have the sommelier on staff pair the wines by course and since there were 6 courses + amuse bouche, everyone got plenty drunk (another brilliant idea). The most technically difficult course was the starter which consisted of a truffle custard cooked in a bain marie, which was served in a an egg shell with a thinly-sliced potato chive chip. The key was to remove the top of the egg shell without cracking the egg and loosen the membrane so that the custard could be cooked inside. The removal of the top of the egg took crazy mad skillz and to prove it we ate omelets every night for a week after the dinner party.

All in all, it was a fun experience and no one died from a heart attack (due to the amount of butter in the food) or of food poisoning, which I think entitles me to count the event as a raging success. It certainly gave me a new appreciation for how much goes into a meal at a restaurant like French Laundry and a renewed love for a meal that can be cooked in under three minutes.

his past weekend was action packed. Not only did I see The Zac Brown Band (!!!) at the first ever West Coast Country Concert in San Francisco, but I also did the tour of the Barney’s Warehouse sale (which was crap) and the Renegade Craft Fair (if you have never gone, you should. It is replete with awesomeness and urban hipsters galore).

As my husband likes to point out, I have an inner hippy which I try to embrace whenever possible (usually in the form of clothes which inevitably elicits the ever-charming response of “you’re wearing that?“). As a result, urban hipster events are pretty much the only time my collection of patchwork empire-waisted tent dresses are allowed to come out of hiding, which means these events are etched in stone on my calendar.

Whatever. Anyway, here are some of my favorites from this year’s crop of crafters:

Catia Chien:
I love these hand-painted images from Catia Chien. They almost have a dreamy quality about them.

Sora Designs:
Handmade vintage jewelry. Reminds me a bit of Elva Fields

Erin Zam:
I love these beautiful, graphic wall hangings by Erin Zam. I bought the one pictured below.

Meryl Munches Macaroni:
Colorful hand-drawn shoes for tykes

Sycamore Street Press:
Beautiful letter pressed number and letter posters for children

Fernworks:
Mixed media creations under resin. After spending an entire summer in my studio inhaling the fumes of resin and cursing my inability to make anything better than decoration for my trash can, I have a new found respect for resin art.

Little Bit:
Handmade dino stuffed animals <3 <3 <3

Mama’s Little Babies:
Victorian Illustration Jewelry

Old Tom Foolery:
I have a soft spot for good, letter pressed type, plus who can resist typestaches?

A Little Birdie Told Moi:
Super adorableness.

Colette Kids:
Graphic tees for infants and children.

Calliope:
Cute tops and headbands for little girls

Paz Sintes:
Unique textile jewelry. Pricey, but beautiful.

Petite Collage:
Cute stuff for Kids’ walls

Sara Paloma Pottery:
Perfectly hand-thrown porcelain.

Hello Hanna:
A one-of-a-kind book kit with buildable stickers and place mats with sticker kits.

Some of the most rewarding moments of the work we do at Duck Duck Moose comes from the feedback we get from other parents and from the connections we make with other artists, app developers and educators. As a creative person, I just love meeting other creative types and hearing more about their creative process and inspiration. One such person is Maggy of Red Ted Art. We just love her sweet, colorful Pop Art style. Its bright colors and clean contours are appealing to young children.

Maggy tells us that although she has never been formally trained, she loves modern art and is inspired by Pop Art in particular. Her first inspiration for painting was her son and from there she went wild, drawing inspiration from every day objects.

In addition to her work, Maggy hosts a forum for craft projects to do with your children.

It was a pleasure to meet you Maggy and keep up the great work!

Wheels on the Bus, Old MacDonald, and Itsy Bitsy Spider all won Parent’s Choice Gold Awards! Duck Duck Moose was the only publisher to receive three Gold Awards – the top honors given by Parents’ Choice Foundation — in the Mobile Apps category.

For toddlers who are eager to learn, try Old MacDonald, Itsy Bitsy Spider, and Wheels on the Bus. The creative team at Duck Duck Moose has created – and delivered – exquisite lessons of cause and effect with a charming and whimsical touch.”
– Parents’ Choice Foundation

Wheels on the Bus

Old MacDonald

Itsy Bitsy Spider

We are so honored! For years, I’ve seen the Parents’ Choice Awards on children’s toys, books, and music in stores, and I remember trolling their website when looking for ideas for good birthday presents. Parents’ Choice Foundation has been around for decades and is the nation’s oldest non-profit program recognizing quality children’s media.

Check out the Parents’ Choice Reviews of:
Wheels on the Bus
Old MacDonald
Itsy Bitsy Spider

have been thinking a lot about nurseries this week since my BFF asked me to participate the in design of the nursery for her newest addition — a boy (a request I am sure her husband will come to regret once he sees what expensive taste I have). So this week’s Weekend Round-up is for you, Cheryl.

via: Nursery Project

via: Ella and Elliott

via: Oh Dee Doh

via: Design Sponge

via: Coochicoos

Creative Inspiration for Nurseries

Even the best designers need a little creative inspiration now and then. Here are some of our favs for jogging your creative spark:

Oh Dee Doh
Land of Nod
Coochicoo Flickr Group
Project Nursery
Ella and Elliot
Serena and Lily