Along with money comes a host of new challenges and things to learn. While it’s easy for me to argue I’ve managed-even if unintentionally-to create something successful on the internet, I’ve never tried my hand at making money.
People that have built sustainable tech businesses are people that understand the many facets of being true product designers. More to learnĪ respected former coworker of mine used to say that when we hired, we looked to hire people who had successfully made money on the internet. Mind you, I love working on GuideGuide, but it’s much easier now for me to associate value with the time I spend on it. The time I put into GuideGuide is time I don’t get to spend elsewhere. My personal time, which once was something I took for granted, has now become a valuable commodity. With this addition GuideGuide has become a luxury item for designers with modern versions of Photoshop.
Because anyone paying for Creative Cloud can freely upgrade to the latests versions, I consider the grid feature “accessible” to all CC users. In CC 2014, Adobe added a grid building feature which-I like to believe-takes heavy inspiration from GuideGuide. I had plenty of time to take for granted, so I did.įour years later, a lot has changed. I could not bring myself to associate a dollar value with it because it was a labor of love, which met an unanswered need within Photoshop. The fourth version of GuideGuide will have a fee, but allow me explain why I’ve gone back on my word. I wouldn’t charge someone to use GuideGuide any more than I would to use their own hands. The original site said, “GuideGuide will always be free.” This came from my belief that it was an extension of every person that used it. I’ve always seen it as something of immeasurable value because it was simply a solution to a problem. GuideGuide was never a product or strategy to me. The people that use GuideGuide are awesome. Compare that to the number that I’ve dealt with related to GitHub, a number that low feels insane to me. Even with that broad of an audience, I can count the number of true trolls I’ve dealt with for GuideGuide on one hand, and even they usually open with some sort of “GuideGuide is great but…” line. Anecdotally, I’m guessing it’s in the millions of installs. However, someone from Adobe reached out to tell me that (at least during 2014) it was the most installed Photoshop plugin, outside of the two that come bundled with Photoshop by default. As such, I don’t have very good historical data for how far GuideGuide has spread. What I learned was that creating a metrics library is not the kind of thing you do as a side project to a side project. One of these learning experiences was experimenting with metrics. Most importantly, I’ve used it as a place to experiment with best (and worst) practices.
I’ve used it as a place to test concepts I’ve learned from working with GitHub’s engineers, like automated testing, build tools, continuous integration, and automatic updates. I’ve learned to use Node.js to run servers, Backbone to build apps, and Grunt to automate my workflow. I’ve learned precompiled languages like CoffeeScript and Sass. Over the course of its development I’ve bootstrapped my skills with Actionscript, XML, Flex, HTML, CSS and Javascript.
As a free plugin, and one that filled a major gap in Photoshop’s feature set, it spread like wildfire. Somewhere in that hour someone stumbled across GuideGuide, posted it somewhere-I still do not know where-and GuideGuide suddenly blew up on Twitter. Over the course of an hour I surged to 1,500 Twitter followers. At the time, the company was small enough that any new person became a minor Twitter celebrity when they were hired. Ten days later I started a job at GitHub. I don’t remember how well it was received, but Twitter now tells me I got two retweets. On January 7th, 2011, I launched GuideGuide. I figured they’d like to try out my handy new tool.
If it could blow my mind, I wondered if it would blow other minds.īack then I had about 300 Twitter followers, mostly art school friends.
Not only had I written some of the most daring code I’d written up to that point, I’d created something that blew my own mind. My palms got a little sweaty and I couldn’t stop smiling. After a couple afternoons of tinkering with it, I ran it for the first time.
I learned how to write a Photoshop script that would add guides at the right places. I figured, I do the same math every time. In late 2010 I needed to solve a problem: I was sick of recalculating and resizing navigation elements in designs every time a client added or subtracted an element. GuideGuide now has it’s own dedicated blog! This post can also be found here.