A Startup Born on Twitter: Paper’d Is Custom Art for Your iPhone [PICS]




A new lifestyle-inspired iOS wallpaper app, Paper’d, is available Monday, offering free, professionally designed wallpapers based on everything from pop culture to worldwide travel.

The app was created by two best friends Jamie Varon and Nicole Antoinette. You may remember Varon from 2009 when she created the website TwitterShouldHireMe.com. The site got a ton of attention, which ultimately led her to create the high-end boutique web design company Shatterboxx in April of that year.

A few months after creating Shatterboxx she stumbled upon now business-partner Antoinette’s blog, reached out to her on Twitter, and the two became friends. Fast forward to December 2009, the Twitter buddies finally met in San Francisco, decided to move in together 24 hours later, and within a few weeks Antoinette became the other half of the Shatterboxx team.

Shatterboxx has done design work for a number of popular blogs including TheBloggess and Rocket Shoes, but this is its first introduction into the app world.

“I always wanted to change the wallpaper on my phone. I would look all over the Internet for options, and they were all on websites. That’s so inefficient,” Varon told Mashable. She found that most wallpaper options were also just curated pictures from the web. “None of it meets the quality of what I’d want to put on my phone,” she said.

The project started out as creating wallpapers for her personal use that she would also share with friends. When her friends started emailing her asking for new wallpapers, Varon realized that there might be a larger market for the designs.

Paper’d was created by two best friends Jamie Varon and Nicole Antoinette.

Click here to view this gallery.

“People don’t need this app, but it will be super fun to have,” says Varon. “We’re passionate about design, and these are things people will look at and say ‘That’s cool!’”

Paper’d offers 200 free, hand-designed wallpapers, as well as around 260 additional images that are part of locked collections priced between $0.99 to $1.99 a piece. Each wallpaper comes with a lock screen image as well as a complementing home screen image. Images –including those that are part of locked collections — can be previewed on your iPhone before you download, and you can choose to download just one wallpaper or an entire collection to your Camera Roll at once.

Varon anticipates adding at least one new collection of wallpapers to the app each week, potentially more or less over time depending on demand.

Curious how two people could go from Twitter friends to launching an app together? Check out the infographic below for more on Varon and Antoinette’s story.

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