Mike Rundle taught himself just about everything he knows. And because his background is in both design and programming, and building animations is also a combination of those skills, Rundle read up online and now spends his days dedicated to designing animations that evoke powerful emotion.
Inspired by Disney’s first hand-drawn animators — those that outlined the fundamental principles for designing and building animations that feel magical — Rundle uses a lot of the same concepts in his own work. He sees animation as the body language of a digital experience and a powerful lever for adding humanity to the experience. And in hopes of sharing his insights with others, he self-published an eBook, Design Then Code, in 2014.
Rundle learned a lot from his friend and businessman Nathan Barry, who published Designing Web Applications, The App Design Handbook and his most recent eBook, Authority: A Step-By-Step Guide to Self-Publishing.
Of the many things Rundle learned, here are five insights for anyone interested in publishing an eBook:
1.) How to come up with an idea and hoe to validate it to make sure it’s commercially viable.
2.) How to write consistently and make sure you don’t get stuck halfway.
3.) Which software to use to write and publish your book.
4.) How to price your eBook, and the results we had with two completely opposite pricing strategies.
5.) How to manage purchases and downloads using a digital delivery service, and which one is the best.
So where did Rundle’s deign/code journey begin?
Rundle’s been design-driven since he was a kid, though in not the most traditional sense. He drew things that were much more design-oriented than art-oriented, such as baseball cards, home plans, sneakers and golf course layouts.
“I mostly drew on graph paper, so although I was artistic it was always in a very constrained, purposeful way,” Rundle said. “When I started learning to code, it was really just a way to get my design thoughts to be real and on the computer screen.”
It wasn’t until college that Rundle discovered he was actually pretty good at it. He was accepted into animation, initially through Macromedia Director scripting and, later, Flash. Once browser technology got a little more advanced he started building animations on the web using JavaScript. It was a time before CSS had any animation capabilities, so Rundle spent hours working on hand-written code for simple animations.
“I loved how I could use motion to make something on the screen express individuality, either through its speed or bounciness or weight,” he said. “When Apple debuted iOS 7 — which was a stark departure from all the previous versions of iOS due to its flat aesthetic — they introduced a number of ways to animate interfaces.”
But Rundle said when the first third-party apps debuted for iOS 7, they used lots of poorly-executed animations. Their speeds were off and their bounciness didn’t look realistic.
“I got a sense that most iOS developers were adding animation just for the sake of it, not knowing how to design and build great animations,” Rundle said. “So I started writing a blog on Medium about animation design.”
Realizing his blog was more than 20 pages long, Rundle decided to self-publish an eBook, not just about the design or theory of animations, but also how to build them for iOS apps.
“A lot of iOS animation books that already existed skipped over the design of animations and just got into the code, and others were only about animation design and had no code at all,” Rundle said. “My eBook turned out to be fairly unique because I go through the theory of animation design, how to make it feel physically real on the screen, and then how to build those animations in code with lots of examples.”
Rundle tried his best to create an eBook that provided the answers he was looking for when he taught himself how to build animation in code. At the time, so many different techniques and frameworks were on the market, it was hard to choose the correct one.
“In addition to the animation APIs that Apple provides to developers, there are also a number of excellent third-party libraries that go above and beyond what Apple provides, so I wanted to cover those as well to give a more well-rounded view of animation development for iOS,” he said.
Throughout his career Mike Rundle has worked on projects for Nike, Mozilla, Yahoo, Intuit, Fox and tons of startups. In 2008, he started learning Objective-C and when the iPad came out he launched Digital Post, a virtual newspaper app for iPad that was featured by Apple. Since then he designed and built a number of iOS apps including Interesting for iPhone, which was No. 1 in the U.S. News category and also featured in the App Store. Rundle is also a technical reviewer for various iPhone development books and has spoken about app development at conferences around the world.