5 – The movie

 

We needed a demo video.Paul was like, “We do?” Totally. We show a video to investors and they’ll be falling over themselves to throw money at us.I didn’t know how to do video. One of my best mates does video so I asked him. He was like, “Sure.” So I tell Paul, “It’s cool, Matt will do the video. Probably take like three days tops.”

So I’m getting the screen shots ready for Matt to animate and I phone him and he’s like, “Huh? I don’t do animation.” I’m like, “Matt? But you do video, that’s your thing.” And he’s like, “Yeah but I don’t do motion graphics.” I’m like, “You doing video but not motion graphics is like me designing text but not pictures.” He’s like, “not really” or something. So I’m like, okay I’ll fucking learn it myself and I did and here’s the video:

(Here’s Matt’s site if you wanna use him for any editing work – he’s good)

4 – Books are dead

 

The book icons. They never sat well with me. They looked old and dusty and, I dunno, restrictive:

Screen shot 2012-08-23 at 10.36.49

I had to come up with something a little less obvious. A bit more abstract. So this is what we’re using right now:

Screen shot 2012-08-23 at 10.37.02

These icons still look ‘bookish’ so you know there’s gonna be content behind them. But more abstracted. They glow from the inside. I said “like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction” and Paul liked it.

3 – Designing the thing

 

Take a look at this:

story_04

White screen with some booky looking icons on it. Real simple. Barely even designed. Like a Mondrian. Like the original iPod. Like some Deiter Rams thing.

It started like this, this is the first rough:

story_01

Paul was like “Looks like shit mate.” It really does. Whatever, it was the rough. The next major design stage was this:

story_02

Then this, it was this for weeks. Note the nav bar at the top and bottom:

story_03

Before finally looking like this (lost the bottom nav but none of the function – total simplicity):

story_04

So yeah, this to this… :

story_05

… took three months and this much work:

pasteboard

2 – Day two

 

Yeah that was it. Paul wanted to make a cooking app where you share pictures of your cooking journey. I was like no, this app will let people share everything. Paul muttered something about only wanting to share the meals he cooks. But I wanted to upload all the pictures I take of weird people on the Tube and write something extremely funny about each one. I said to Paul that this app should share text as well as pictures. Paul muttered some an agreement and Story hasn’t really changed since day two.

Next up, time to design the thing.

1 – Beginning

 

We were slagging off the Path app, a kinda Facebook clone, and Paul says something like, “I thought Path was gonna be this cool app for sharing photo stories. Like, sharing a journey with your friends…”

That was the seed, as soon as he said that the idea exploded. I instantly saw an app that was so simple; book icons that open up into blog-style posts. So simple, you post and follow people like on twitter.

That’s the start of our app Story.

People are always searching for an idea; something to grow. Mostly, ideas are forced into existence. But all the greatest ideas are so simple. They appear so easily that we wonder how they haven’t always existed.

CORRECTION: Scrub that, Paul says the idea started from a cooking app he wanted to make.