One week after the original iPhone launched, some smart people thought it would be a gaming revolution. We helped them name and brand their company, and create multi-player iPhone games.

It is easy to forget how incredibly ground breaking the iPhone was when first launched. It changed everything in the mobile device market, and that’s why we were very excited to work on this project. Our first task was to name the company. After making a spreadsheet matrix of the potential names, we presented our favorite name first. It turned out the founders of the company were very fond of Tyler Durden. ByteClub was born.

We wanted the ByteClub brand to specifically appeal to technically proficient gamers of any age. We also wanted the branding to embrace “Early Adopters”, but not alienate other demographics. We decided to take an unconventional approach. We designed a fictional brand for a futuristic candy bar – attractive to the tech crowd, desirable for children, and appetizing to everyone. We were excited with the results, and realized if we could develop an equally compelling design language for the user interface, our approach would be substantiated. Our next task was to create an innovative user interface design for a brand new device – the iPhone.

The challenge of designing for any mobile device with a touch interface, like the iPhone, is the size of the average finger tip. Every link or button has to be at least 24 pixels high and wide, and really should be 34 pixels square. This was a new paradigm in design. We experimented with numerous techniques and designs, finally embracing the designs you see in the ByteClub interface above. As you can see, we used small icons representing touchable areas both large and small. We also used color and brightness to focus the eye, and we continue to use some of these techniques in our designs today.

For the actual game designs, we relied heavily on our experience, back in the 1990s, of dealing with small screen sizes (640 x 480) and decorating graphics pixel by pixel. This was very beneficial in designing and creating the individual game sprites needed for such a small screen, and also in designing the frame by frame imagery needed for the game play’s animation.

We were a part of the ByteClub team at the very beginning, and they were one of the first, if not the first, multi-player iPhone gaming solution. We’re still proud of the work we did for them, and continue to wish them the best of luck