Mark Jardine

Mark Jardine is a Texas-based designer best known as the co-founder of Tapbots, the tiny app studio behind Tweetbot, the Mastodon client Ivory, Pastebot and Calcbot. Jardine handles all of the company's creative work, from interface and icon design to 3D renders, while co-founder Paul Haddad leads development, and their apps are known for a playful robot personality and meticulous detail.

Jardine wanted to be an illustrator and character designer as a teenager, then studied in the graphic design program at California State University, Long Beach. Finding it focused on print while he was more interested in the web, he taught himself web design and left school to work full time as a web designer. About eight years later he joined Oakley as a user-interface designer and front-end developer, and by then had become interested in Mac icon and UI design.

At Oakley he met Haddad around 2007. When Apple opened the iPhone SDK in 2008, Haddad asked him to help design a simple weight-tracking app; the result, Weightbot, and the unit converter Convertbot gave Tapbots its robot style, inspired by the film WALL-E. The pair soon quit their jobs to make apps full time. Tweetbot, launched on April 14, 2011, became one of the most admired Twitter clients on iPhone, iPad and Mac until Twitter shut off third-party apps in January 2023.

Tapbots answered with Ivory, a Mastodon client released in January 2023, followed by Ivory for Mac in May 2023, both sold by subscription. The company remains three people, including developer Todd Thomas, living in North Texas and Canada; Jardine lives about 30 minutes north of Dallas. Tapbots also still sells Pastebot and Calcbot and has a new Weightbot in development. In 2026 Jardine wrote about building the team's own bug tracker with Claude in about a week, and about the wave of non-programmers shipping AI-built apps.

Jardine is a key figure in the indie Apple design scene, proof that a two-person, self-funded studio can set the visual standard for an entire app category.