About this book

It is the year 2012 and there is already a lot of talk about mobile apps. However, some still call them "a-p-p" as if they were an acronym.

For designers back then, tackling an app is a difficult task. The only online resources are the official development guides aimed at programmers — which are also only available in English.

It's hard to know where to start; what to take into account. Android and iOS present contrasting visions, but they are not the only mobile operating systems available.

On a walk with my friend José Vittone, I somehow convinced him to write a book in Spanish about app design. Clearly neither of us knew what we were getting into. And maybe that's why we did it.

Let's go a few months forward. It's June 2013 and we already have the digital and printed version of Designing Mobile Apps published. To get to that point we wrote 12 chapters and interviewed 5 designers. The contents were edited, corrected, translated into English and laid out.

Looking back, it was a huge task, managed by ourselves, that we would not dare to repeat.

This website presents the original content published in 2013, which has barely been updated since then. Re-reading them, some chapters remain astonishingly relevant. Others are more of a documentary testimony of what it was like to design apps —and how we thought about it— back then.

In any case, we leave the complete book free and accessible with the hope that someone else, even ten years later, can continue learning. After all, that's why this project ever started.

— Javier Cuello