INTERVIEW: Cosmic Mission (aka Fabio Basile)

Tell us all about Cosmic Mission and what it’s all about.

Cosmic Mission is my company, is my little shop front to the wide web
It’s currently being overhauled as I will be offering different types of services just after the summer, a designer is never happy with his / her site and I spend a lot of time scrapping ideas and tweaking pixels.

What software do you use?

I try to keep my toolset pretty minimal although as I enjoy designing and developing stuff I have to use a variety of apps for the right tasks, on the graphical side I use almost daily Adobe Photoshop CS5, mostly for pixel work, websites and UIs. It’s a very powerful tool with incredibly frustrating issues but I have yet to find a good replacement, and Adobe Illustrator CS5 which I use mostly for designing glyphs and vector icons and the occasional font rendering.

On the programming side I use Apple XCode 4, for anything iOS and Mac OS related, TextMate for coding the websites I design and for scripting in Ruby on Rails. I am also a heavy user of git and GitHub for versioning my data (both code and graphics).

Finally two apps that I can’t live without are Dropbox, it’s just magic how you can share your drafts with your clients and Backblaze for automatic offsite backups of all my data, just in case something goes wrong

What methods or processes do you have for designing user interfaces?

I have an almost set routine whenever I need to create User Interfaces, typically I begin with paper and pencil, I find Field Notes to be particularly useful whenever I am around, I am not very talented when it comes to hand drawings but it’s a great way of expressing myself by quickly jotting down ideas without spending too much time in Photoshop and without getting too attached to a particular interface just in case the client wants to scrap it.

I send daily updates to all my clients and when we both agree on a particular design I sketch it out in Photoshop using very simple shapes and basic gradients, the most important thing is to get the usability right, once the interface feels right we refine the rest, creating icons, glyphs, patterns etc.

Do you have any tips for people looking to start getting involved with mobile UI / how did you get started?

This is a bit of a tricky question for me I started out as a software engineer specialising in games development and games mechanics without a background in design but I felt more passionate about design up to the point of switching my career and concentrating on just designing things for a while. I would recommend to start tinkering with Photoshop and user interfaces for mobile applications, they are a great for learning since you are restricted by the screen size and sometimes limitations are a great incentive to innovate and get creative.

I started in a similar manner, trying to make money while I was at University

What’s been the most interesting app you’ve been involved with?

I was lucky to work on great apps and with some talented people, if I have to name the most popular one then I would go for the newly released Tap to Chat 2, the guys at Osmosis Apps loved what I created for them up to the point of using the icon as the logo for their new company.

Who do you look for inspiration when designing?

Dribbble is my best source of inspiration for sure, there are so many talented artists it’s just incredible what some people can achieve. I also look at traditional art and printed advertising as a secondary source of inspiration.

What good apps have you seen recently?

Sparrow email client, which I use for my various email accounts, and
Fantastical app which has to be the best around, great UI and really useful if you don’t like fiddling with Calendars.

What will you be working on in the coming months?

The summer period is always busy for me, I am booked to work on some exciting new projects for the guys at Shiny Frog, I can’t really say much right now but if you are reading this interview I am sure you’ll find their apps extremely useful (hint hint)! Just keep an eye on my Twitter feed.

I have also managed to finish a couple of contracts with some big names like Clinton Cards, ZOO Magazine and Imogen Thomas, so I hope they will have more projects for me shortly

Apps that Cosmic Mission has been involved in:

Some of the bigger apps are not out yet, the developers have been working hard squashing bugs before the big 1.0 so unfortunately I can only show what’s already available:

1TapAlarm (for iPhone and iPad)
Tap to Chat 2 (for iPhone and iPad)
Eavesdrop (iPhone)
Instinctiv (mobile and desktop) http://www.instinctiv.com/
Social Tunes (iPad, icon only)
Emerge app (iOS, enterprise)
Sally Park (iOS, graphics refresh)

and many more apps that are either for internal use only or yet to be released.

Bookmark the Cosmic Mission site or follow Cosmic Mission on Twitter.