Fakenote Studio

Design files, assets and notes from the Flipnote Switch mockup that was part of our community's 2020 April Fools prank.

Background

Flipnote Studio is a free animation app available on the Nintendo DSi and 3DS. As part of an elaborate annual April Fools prank in a few small Flipnote-centric communities on Discord, we decided to fake some "leaked" screenshots of an new version of the app for the Nintendo Switch.

Unbeknownst to us, somebody in the community ended up going to some press outlets with the screenshots. In typical gaming journalism fashion the sketchy source was ignored and the "leaks" ended up going semi-viral. Once we revealed ourselves as the source of the fake screenshots, there was a significant amount of backlash from disappointed fans, with a select few going so far as to call for us to be doxxed or murdered (yikes)

You can catch the whole story on IGN.

But amongst all of the vitriol I ended up being contacted by a handful of developers who liked the UI designs and were interested in using them for their own homebrew animation applications. Seeing a potentially positive outcome to the whole fiasco, I figured I'd open-source everything we made under a permissive, do-whatever-the-heck-you-want-with-it liscense!

Changes

Stripped out Nintendo assets such as the Flipnote frogs
Changed official logos to "Fakenote Studio" / "うそメモ帳"
Fixed Japanese text and provided English translations for everything
Fixed various layout and alignment issues

So far there aren't any more screen layouts or icons beyond the ones featured in the leaks, but I may consider adding extra things if people want them!

Overview

/sketchfiles - Source project files. This project was made with Sketch, although you should also be able to open these files with either AdobeXD or Figma
/screens - Full-resolution screenshot mockups in both English and Japanese
/artwork - Original sample artwork images created by Calcium (a lot of which went unused!)
/assets - Image files for various icons / buttons / backgrounds / etc provided in PNG and SVG formats

Fonts

For accuracy, we tried to use the same fonts that Nintendo uses in the Flipnote games. You will need to aquire these yourself:

FOT-Seurat Pro - Main UI font, available from Adobe Typekit.
FOT-Rodin Pro - Secondary UI font, also available from Adobe Typekit.

The title font is based on FOT-Pop Happiness, although I ended up just eyeballing this and drawing it with the bezier tool.

Credits