ios App design

Key highlights

• End-to-end concept, design, and content for two travel apps

• 10,000+ hand-curated locations researched, photographed, and written over multiple years

• Featured as App of the Week in Apple’s Travel category

The challenge

The idea began while I was working and traveling with the Kansas City–based PBS series Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations, which visited more than 600 self-taught artists, artist-built environments, roadside attractions, and offbeat sites across the country.

While that experience was incredible, it revealed a problem from a user’s perspective. Six hundred locations make for great television, but a frustrating travel experience—if you’re on the road and nothing else is nearby, the journey falls apart. I realized that for the experience to truly work, it needed depth, density, and context.

The challenge became building something that didn’t just showcase remarkable places, but actually supported how people travel—where discovery depends on what’s around you, not just what’s famous.

My role

This was fully authored work. I:

• Designed the entire app experience and all screens

• Built and maintained a database of more than 10,000 unique, hand-curated locations

• Shot all photography and wrote all content

• Oversaw submission to Apple and ongoing refinement

  (The only piece I didn’t do was the technical build.)

How it came together

What started as documentation turned into a system. I expanded the scope far beyond the original 600 sites, researching and curating thousands of additional locations so the experience would feel rich and useful no matter where someone was traveling.

Each location was selected deliberately—researched, photographed, and written to capture what made it worth stopping for. The experience prioritized storytelling and discovery over checklists or rankings, favoring curiosity and context over optimization.

Over time, the project became two distinct apps: one covering offbeat travel across the entire U.S., and another focused specifically on Route 66. Each shared the same foundation, but served different kinds of journeys—one broad and exploratory, the other deeply specific and historical.

The apps were submitted to Apple and featured as App of the Week in the Travel category. More importantly, they became a long-term exploration of how design, content, and systems can work together when the goal is experience, not scale for its own sake.