Night & Day Studios
Night & Day Studios creates iPhone and iPad apps for the arts, education, and entertainment. We partner with media companies and individuals, license and publish brands, and develop our own apps. As a team, we have backgrounds in educational software design, brand development, sales and marketing, exhibition design and developmental psychology. We have the skills and experience to deliver complex content to new people in new situations. Our aim is to delight the imaginations of children and adults.
Night and Day Studios is managed by Erin Rackelman and Nat Sims; together with our staff we have over 25 talented team members with a history of collaboration and creative solutions.
Nat Sims is the founder, CEO, and Creative Director for Night & Day Studios. He has been a content developer and media designer for 20 years, creating exhibits, websites, electronic music, educational software, scripts, interpretive plans and programs, and games.
At Night & Day Nat has invented and developed original projects, such as the bestselling Peekaboo Barn; produced licensed apps such as Kindermusik Radio and Eric Carle’s My Very First App; and developed apps for private firms and partners on various projects not published under the NDS banner.
Nat’s background includes educational software and graphic design. After designing his own major in interface design at Hampshire College, he earned his master’s degree at the University of California San Diego studying cultural cognition. His research focused on the way adults and children learn from interactive media. One of his early projects was a range of interactives for a hands-on science curriculum for deaf children developed at Smith College. He has also edited instructional and music videos, and composed music professionally for video, film, and computer games.
Nat has produced interactive software, audiovisual environments, and exhibit and graphic panel design for museum exhibitions including Beyond Lewis & Clark: The Army Explores the West, Carnegie Institution’s centennial Our Expanding Universe, Illinois Passages for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Smithsonian traveling exhibition This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie.
Erin Rackelman was born and raised in central Florida. She attended Florida State University, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Literature. During her tenure at FSU she studied abroad in London and interned for the LA Times at the Cannes Film Festival, which began her continuing interest in world travel.
In 2006, Erin began working as a consultant, specializing in branding, marketing, sales, and PR for several independent fashion and luxury goods designers. She spent several months of each year traveling to New York, London, and Paris fashion weeks, and ultimately getting several Northwest designers accounts at Barney’s and Isetan and features in WWD, Vogue, New York Times, and GQ.
In 2008, Erin joined Night & Day Studios, where she is now the Marketing Director and Lead Business Developer. Erin got Peekaboo Barn and various subsequent apps featured by Apple, the New York Times, Wired, and USA Today. She sought out the licensing rights to The World of Eric Carle, and followed by securing the rights to Richard Scarry’s Busy Town, Yo Gabba Gabba, Caillou, Charley Harper, and Ed Emberley. Night & Day has ongoing relationships with Cookie Jar (CPLG), Chorion, Penguin Books, W.W. Norton, Wiley & Sons, and Viacom.
Ms. Rackelman and her partner Nat Sims now manage a staff of more than 25 team members with backgrounds in game design, software development, graphic design, marketing, music composition, sound, illustration, and animation. Night & Day has created 35 apps and has more than 20 currently in development for the iPhone, iPad, Android, and the Mac.
