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🤿 washi or doodle?

🤿 washi or doodle?

what it takes to win app of the year

Ridd
January 24, 2025

What does it take to create a product worthy of winning Mac app of the year?

I interviewed the founder of Craft Docs, Balint Orosz, to find out.

Here are a few of the things that stood out to me 👇

1 — Mobile first

Balint intentionally started with a mobile app (remember how Play made a similar decision?). This ensured they created the simplest possible solution.

2 — Personalization

With their latest Craft 3 release, the team is saying “no” to B2B and focusing 100% on consumer.

So many of their experiments have been about finding fun ways to make Craft feel like home for users. As a result you get wildly different UIs depending on how you use it (which I find awesome).

Craft can be black and white text or a colorful personal Pinterest. Which presents a ton of unique design challenges.

I may or may not have spent last night in Figma trying to find ways to bring this level of personalization into the product I’m designing 😅

3 — Figma = sketching

They think about Figma as the initial phase of “sketching”. This means more often than not they have significant changes happen while a design is brought to life in code.

Part of this is because the design of Craft is so heavily influenced by the content. But it also forces designers and engineers to work closely and explore ideas in tandem.

“Engineering’s not pissed off if we need to throw away something”

Balint

Balint also mentioned how there’s a pretty wide spectrum of technical savvy on the design team. Some designers are more than comfortable polishing things in code but it’s not necessary. Either way, engineers are encouraged to write code that designers can easily read.

4 — Unique approach to design systems

Craft invests in a system for speed but it looks prettttty different than you might expect.

They don’t focus on atomic components at all. Instead they systematize things like their animation engine and theming. That way it’s very easy to:

Animate 25 elements on a screen all at once
Inherit the “glowing” effect of a gradient background material
Add a gradient fader on top of a text label with a single line of code

You know what you won’t find in their system though? A button component.

And Balint admits you might find a lack of standardization here and there but this is how they feel they can most quickly create green field projects.

5 — Ownership and experimentation

Craft has two roadmaps:

Two weeks
One year

This creates a lot of space for reacting to customer feedback but also for experimentation. Which means designers have a ton of ownership at Craft.

You’re expected to experiment with things like LLMs, creating your own washi tape, and even shaders!

And after a week or two you report back to the team and make a case for whether Craft should continue to “fund” your experiment.

6 — #1 trait

I asked Balint “What’s the #1 trait you look for in designers?”

His answer 👉 systems thinking

There’s a lot more where that came from…

We go deep into how they work and what it takes to achieve an award-winning level of design excellence.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH VISUAL ELECTRIC

One of my favorite parts of the recent episode with Smith & Diction was hearing about Mike’s experience generating brand imagery using Visual Electric.

“I was already in visual electric because it looks like Figma. It feels like Figma. It operates like Figma. And that to me, I was just like, I was comfortable. I felt like I can move around in here with confidence”

Mike Smith

I think that’s exactly why I love the product so much too. Visual Electric is so clearly built specifically for designers.

This is a reminder that you can get your first month for free with the code DIVECLUB 👇