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

e at Duck Duck Moose have a lot to be thankful for this year! As Thanksgiving approaches, we want to give a special shout out to those who have supported us…

• The Moms With Apps community of independent parent developers, who support each other in developing quality apps for families. Happy 1 Year Anniversary, and here’s to many more!
• Lorraine Akemann – A fellow Bay Area mom, Co-Founder of Moms with Apps, and app developer herself, who tirelessly supports indie app developers through her posts, networking, and connections.
• Jennifer Evans Beatty who is not only the beautiful voice of Fish School and Baa Baa Black Sheep and our daughter’s preschool teacher at Bing Nursery School, but also an app developer herself of Little Bot
• The Saint Michael Trio for their music, and particularly Danny Cher, for his original arrangements. And yes, it is no coincidence that the cellist has an uncanny resemblance to Duck Duck Moose Co-Founder, Michael Flexer.
• Brennan Pursell and Karen Frankenstein for their amazing singing in Wheels on the Bus, Old MacDonald, and Itsy Bitsy Spider.
• The Dust or Magic Institute and its community for introducing us to the industry and for educating and inspiring us. A post on the 2010 Institute coming soon.
• To fellow kid app developers BabyBinks,Tickle Tap Apps, MomMaps, Picpocket Books, KidCalc, Ten Toed, Fourth Story Media, Motion Math, Launchpad Toys, Pi’ikea Street, Nosy Crow (and many others!) for great apps and conversations.
• All the children, parents, and educators, who have supported us on this journey, have let us test with their kids, sent us feedback, showed us their home videos, and shared wisdom and resources with us.Our own children (ages 2 and 5) who were our original inspiration, are now our product managers at “The Duck Duck Moose,” and are the voices behind many sound effects “Wow!” “Cool!” “Oh no, piggy!” And of course to the Gicclet… Our newest product manager-to-be.

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

he App-O’-Lantern contest has just launched! Put down your iPad, pick up a knife and start carving! Carve an homage to your favorite app.

Prizes include an Apple TV and lots of free apps from independent developers of children’s apps.

The contest is being organized by indie developer BabyBinks, who also happen to have three children under the age of 5 in their house. Check out their Stork-Drop-O’-Lantern.

Duck Duck Moose will be helping to judge the contest — we can’t wait to see all the creations!

Happy October! Carve away!

am a little late for last week and way too early for this week, but life has been crazy around these parts. We are getting ready to launch a new app, preparing for a new (little) addition to the Duck Duck Moose family and house-hunting. Anyway, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!

I am always inspired by type. Lately, I have been going back to some of my old favorites: Mrs Eaves (timeless and beautiful), Avenir (swoon), Franklin Gothic (dependable and sturdy) and Bodoni, Interstate, Univers. Here are a few modern examples of typographers and type that inspire me on a daily basis.

How does he do this on napkins?? Check out more examples on his Flickr

This is a crazy labor of love

I love Maira Kalman’s hand typography. She has such an original style and a quirky sense of humor. I have been thinking about her a lot lately because I recently went to her show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. It is lovely — definitely worth seeing. Maira was my advisor and mentor in grad school and one of the biggest reasons I gravitated towards children’s illustration. If you don’t have any of her books — you should, they are simply inspired.

This dude is crazy talented.

I adore this site by Jessica Hische. A daily dose of illustrated typographic inspiration.

Marian Bantjes — what more is there to say?

The g is the most beautiful letter, imho.

A tribute to Herb Lubalin

Edible dingbats via Simplebits

Herding cats via Apartment Therapy. 100 cats are released in Ikea for a commercial shoot.

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.