Aficionado App was conceived from the understanding of culture, the discovery of a need, and the itch to improve the status quo. Cigars culture has a rich history that could survive entirely without technology. What started with an interest in taste and smell, lead to an uncanny desire to document and collect every piece of aesthetic I could find. I fell in love with cigar bands, the packaging, and even various hues of tobacco leaves. I started pairing different cigars with different foods and drinks. I started asking questions about where particular leaves came from. I made note of what I liked, what hints of flavor I could pick up, and which ones were similar.

I needed the best way possible to document my findings. The common cigar dossier comes leather-bound with blank pages, ready for someone to glue cigar bands in and take notes on. My iPhone did similar things minus the smells and with a better typeface than my own handwriting. I wanted the aesthetic of the app to be as visually rich as the materials I had been collecting. The tobacco leaves, cedar backgrounds, cigars, and bands are all created from photos I took and artifacts I've scanned. Unfortunately, these visual niceties are what made the app a real disaster to develop. A database with high-resolution images of every cigar band and type wasn't going to create itself.