The Age of Shipping
Some thoughts on what it means to make things now.
I hope you’re having some fun in this mad timeline we find ourselves in?
I enjoy writing. I still enjoy designing, and I don’t want a machine to do those things for me. When you read something here or see some of my graphic design, rest assured that this flawed human typed the words and pushed most of the pixels.
However, I am not a developer. Apart from some early-00s HTML and CSS, and a failed stint studying computer science, I have always had to rely on other people to help me bring software into this world.
Don’t get me wrong, that has taken me on some wonderful adventures, and I have had the privilege, and still do, of working with amazing humans who help me create everything from apps and websites to games.
I am a designer. I design things. I wake up with too many ideas and too little time to pursue them.
But I also look at the world through the jaded eyes of someone who has been making things for 25 years. Someone who has pitched and been pitched every conceivable thing you could make.
I used to know roughly what could be done and, sometimes, even what could be done profitably.
But every hard-learned truth about thing-making is rapidly disintegrating.
Things that would have been unfeasible for a team to build just a few years ago are now within reach of anyone with the time and the ability to properly communicate what they want.
For designers specifically, this is incredible, because being able to articulate what we want is exactly what we’ve been doing for most of our careers. This is our world now.
When anyone can make anything, the ability to clearly communicate what you want, and how you want it to look, work and feel, is a lighthouse in a sea of slop.
We’ve entered the Age of Shipping. While I stopped guessing what’s over the horizon some time ago, I can tell you a few things that I think will hold true for at least the next few years.
Small teams and solo developers or designers will vastly outperform bigger teams in many areas.
We’re going to see an explosion of custom software that previously wouldn’t have been feasible to engineer.
In a twist of fate, ideas, not execution, will reign supreme. Details and craft still matter, but the best ideas will be the ones that earn distribution.
The distance between having an idea and making it real has collapsed. I am not the first person to make that point.
In fact, by the standards of the hype cycle, I’m probably fairly late. But in the real world, the one you go out into when you’re not reading these words, we’re all incredibly early.
When I realized this, I stopped talking about it and got to work. Because no matter how you feel about AI, nothing really beats results.
I started building Cibby, the game collection app I always wished existed. It has been an eye-opener. I’m building not only a highly customized iOS app, but what I expect will become one of the largest databases of 3D-modelled physical video games.
Cibby is well underway and currently being tested by hundreds of people. If you’d like to help, join the Discord and grab a TestFlight spot.
This week, I shipped something else.
I spent years making the App Icon Books, and they remain some of the work I’m proudest of. But they never really had a website that did them justice.
The old site was made for the original Kickstarter campaign. Once the books had shipped, I only made small changes because building the website I actually wanted would have been a considerable investment.
Not anymore.
The new appiconbook.com brings both books together, with their stories, films, timelines, indexes and a few pages you can turn.
It gives a project I care deeply about the home it always deserved.
That idea had been sitting in my head for years. This time, I just made it.
None of this makes ideas, taste or craft less important. Quite the opposite. When making becomes easier, deciding what deserves to exist becomes the real work.
I still have too many ideas and too little time. But suddenly, I have far fewer excuses.
What a wonderfully dangerous time to be a designer.
P.S. Both App Icon Books are available individually or together as the complete collection, with worldwide delivery from Denmark. Have a look at appiconbook.com. Can’t believe we only have 430 sets left. Would be good to move those out of storage and into hands though.