Pi'ikea St.

Ben is founder and designer of Pi'ikea St., a children's brand that's focused on creating high quality kid's apps for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Check it out.

Interactive Alphabet

Pi'ikea St.'s first app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch is Interactive Alphabet, an award-winning app that makes every letter of the alphabet a toy! Learn more about Interactive Alphabet

Color for iPods

A monthly coloring contest where the prize is a shiny new iPod Touch! Get Coloring!

    Latest from the blog

  • Interactive Alphabet for iPad

    It’s been a long long road to the release of my very first iPad app Interactive Alphabet for iPad. It is a super fun app for babies, toddlers, preschoolers, and their parents that makes every letter flash card an interactive toy. It has unbelievably awesome music and sound effects and is the ultimate alphabet app for the ipad. But don’t stick around here any longer, check it out on the website: http://piikeastreet.com.

    I started this project as the first interactive product for my brand of children’s fun things, Pi’ikea St. It was a long road but I got to work with some incredible people and learned SO much. I will be writing more about the development process and a lot of the big ideas I learned, as well as posting updates on how the app is doing. For now, go get Interactive Alphabet for iPad and have fun!

  • Uke Hunt

    Anyone who knows me knows that I am practically in love with the ukulele. In my mind it is the perfect instrument and I think that if everyone picked one up and learned a few chords the world would be a much happier place. The vast ukulele subculture on the internet taught me how to play and I owe some of the first songs I learned to a site called Uke Hunt run by the incomparable Woodshed. The site has since become my favorite for all things uke, so I was blown away when Woodshed himself contacted me about creating a new look for the site.

    Uke Hunt is a bold and irreverent blog for the modern ukulele player so it called for a graphic new look that bucks the infuriating stereotypes of Tikis and Tiny Tim. The new look is bold, simple, and playful. The new logo reinforces the spirit of the blog and, as one reader pointed out, calls to mind the sight of the thousands of ukuleles held high and proud at the performance of Ode to Joy by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

    Aside from the new look the site presented a greater challenge. Over the years Uke Hunt has evolved and branched out into many areas and even different sites. While the blog is focused on tabs and chords and ukulelia in general, there are other resources Woodshed offers like ebooks, lessons and reviews. Many readers, myself included, often didn’t even know about the other offerings and sometimes didn’t even know when we found them that they were attached to Uke Hunt.

    We solved this problem by gathering everything up and giving it the same distinct Uke Hunt look and feel. We also created the Uke Hunt nav bar which allowed some of the separate sites to remain under the Uke Hunt umbrella while still remaining its own site. For these sites we also created unique banners in the new Uke Hunt styling.

    This project was a blast to work on and I’m tremendously grateful to Woodshed for letting me be a part of it.