It started with static.

Hi, I'm Ravi. I design these cases in Fremont, California.

When I was a kid, my dad had a tabletop radio and a small transistor, and we'd sit with them turning the dial. Static, then a hiss, then boom, a station would come through from somewhere you'd never been. And you'd keep going, just to see what else was out there. That feeling of exploring never really left me.

Earlier this year I built Radio Star, an app that brings it back. You spin a dial that looks like the real thing, hear static between stations, and stop when something catches your ear. It's drawn the old way, with chrome, glass and a needle sweeping across the band. That style has a name, skeuomorphism, and phones mostly traded it for flat, plain screens. People kept asking if they could get that dial on the back of their phone.

So I started drawing cases. Tape decks, VU meters, an old rangefinder. Each one is printed flat but drawn to look real, so your thumb keeps looking for a knob. That's the "faux" in Fauxplate.

Then it grew the way the radio did, one station at a time: deep space, the open ocean, little daydreams, and a whole club of cats, because no phone case ever got worse by adding a cat.

Every case is made to order for your exact iPhone, most of the art cases take your name (or your cat's) for free, and they cost about what a plain one does. Looks expensive. Isn't.

If there's a design you wish existed, write to me. That's how half the stations ended up in Radio Star, too.

Ravi