The recipe for a playful, rebellious aesthetic is pretty simple. Start with an era of optimism 🌌, add your old emo highschool blog 💔, mix in an old synth 🎹, season with a fallible human touch 💅.

(∩ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)⊃━☆ﾟ

Stir until velvety smooth, then throw it in the oven. While we’re baking, let’s chat like we used to.

The Era of Computer Optimism 🌌

In the 80s, we knew computers were going to change the world (well not me, I was in diapers). This was the era of MacOS, Kid Pix, HyperCard and Microsoft Excel. Actual humans could use computers to write book reports, do business things, compose music and draw art.

In lots of ways, my hopes for the web parallel the optimistic, egalitarian spirit of those times. The web connects us like nothing else ever has – we should use it to make even better book reports, businesses, music and art.

Web 1.0 Smelled Like Teen Spirit 💔

In the Geocities era we (still not me) told everyone that they should have a website – and a lot of us did. www.geocities.com/pketh was the Final Fantasy 6 place to be. It had all of the frames, all of the GIFs, all of the MIDIs, and I made damn sure you knew that it was best viewed in Netscape Navigator.

My friend’s secret Livejournal would burn your eyes and your soul. We’re talking about paragraphs of yellow and pink comic sans on a purple, sometimes rainbow, background. She set her mood on every post to basically sensual, and wrote exclusively about the boys she liked that week.

None of us were great at making websites, because that wasn’t the point. We made things because we felt invited to.

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create. ― _Why The Lucky Stiff

The Tool Should Be Musical 🎹

Glitch looks like a text editor but it’s really a creativity tool, standing on the shoulders of giants like Ableton, Logic, and Audition.

There’s a reason that list is only music software. Functionally, the music workflow revolves around a loop of record something, play it back, edit it, play it back, tweak it some more, record the next part. Making music is an iterative, non-linear, often collaborative process – yup, just like software.

Culturally, music software, and communities like Soundcloud, are where the next generation of artists replace the old guard. Music tools are pop culture cool, they’re colourful and visually striking, but also a quiet, focused place to create.

That Fallible Human Touch 💅

Have you ever bought a really fancy notebook? Maybe it was imported from Japan and the paper is hand pressed from 100 year old oaks. How do you live up to this? Am I supposed to write my shitty grocery list in this masterpiece?

Every color, element, illustration, and interaction is something I’ve killed myself over in Glitch. But I hope when you use it, you’ll treat it like scrap paper that blew into your yard. Put whatever you want in it, the rougher, the more daring, the more useless, the better.

Not everything has to be serious and not every app has to be a business. Sometimes software can just be for fun.

The aesthetic of Glitch is a fuck you to design shaming, the idea that things on the internet have to look ‘designed’, ‘polished’ and ‘professional’. We do our own thing because we hope that you will too.

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My favorite building in Toronto is the Ontario College of Art and Design (aka OCAD). I never went to design school but I owe a lot to this cool rectangle.

During a particularly long spell of unemployment, I hung out at the OCAD library almost everyday. My hot picks were volumes of ‘Illustration in Japan’ from the 80s, graphic design award compendiums and back issues of Computer Arts.

Sometimes I’d take notes, sometimes I’d try and reproduce things. I’d given up on finding a job. I only cared about getting over the painful gap between where I was and where I wanted to be.

I wonder if I would’ve been on that grind in the same way if OCAD looked like any every other school. Whether we realize it or not, ambitious things draw us in and inspire us with the personality of the people who made them.

Speaking of, this particular building was designed by a particular architect named Will Alsop.

I caught one of his talks at a local university, he seems like a cool guy, I hope I give as few fucks when I’m that old. He talked about a bar he designed and dropped a line about how the joy people get out of something is directly proportional to the joy the creators had while making it.

Years later, I still think about that line a lot.

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The scientists who designed nuclear bombs weren’t assholes. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the nuclear bomb project, was a scientist’s scientist with left-leaning liberal political views.

From what I’ve read, it sounds like working on the atomic bomb was a dope time. You had a cool boss, unlimited money, job prestige, passionate coworkers and really interesting problems to solve at the intersection of physics, chemistry, metallurgy and bomb theory. You probably also got free lunch.

And then your work ships, and you realize you’ve fucked the world.

Will the internet of the next decade be an empowering force for human progress (like nuclear power) or for crimes against society (like nuclear bombs)?

Slapping Ethics in the Face 🙋🏻

<Insert something inspiring and uplifting here>, like: as designers and engineers, we have a moral imperative to build software that doesn’t mislead, divide and abuse people and society.

Duh. Of course we do. Nobody wakes up wanting to make shitty things for garbage people.

Whether it’s fascist regimes, the NSA, Facebook, or the Kardashians, bringing out the worst in humanity will always be easy money. There’ll always be developers that corporations and governments can throw money, prestige or interesting problems at and make what they want.

These developers aren’t assholes either. Some will be new to the profession, some will want the perceived safety or legitimacy of a large corporation, some will just really need the money. I’ve been that developer, I’ve made banner ads. I’ve seen some shit.

An Alternative to Outrage 🌚

You’ve got more power than you think to build what you want to exist.

Most programming is just turning text into another kind of text. With the helpful tools and services we’ve got today, writing code is less gross than it’s ever been (maybe, possibly, even fun).

There’s still so much good software to make:

• We’re still bad at connecting diverse people, with diverse perspectives, in meaningful and respectful ways.
• We’re still bad at building quality software for professionals. Ever used Blackboard? Quickbooks? Anything made by Oracle? Pretty much every human with a job is forced to use crap software to do their jobs.

Cash Rules Everything Around Me 💰

But how do we fund the good stuff? That’s also something we’re bad at.

Ideally if you’re solving a real problem for real people they’d pay you. But that’s really hard for some industries, like education, where your users (e.g. teachers) are cash strapped, and the organizations they work for only buy through RFPs and sales teams.

What’s a little guy to do?

On Patreon, I give 1041uuu a dollar a month, they make cool art. It’s pretty simple.

What would a Patreon for small software makers look like I wonder?

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In the course of my life, sometimes someone will bring up something semen related and I’m excited. Not because semen, but because there’s a chance we’ll get to talk about biology.

The neuroscience of poverty studies the relationship between brain pattern development in children and well, poverty. According to Newsweek, recent studies in the field have found that impoverished children tend to have less grey matter (associated with design thinking, problem solving, impulse control and emotional control) and lower brain surface areas than children from families bringing home $150,000 or more a year.

The nurture part is pretty straightforward; it’s no surprise that having a head start in life gives you a head start in life. The nature part, tying social success to inherent biological capability, is where things start to get umm.. shady.

The history of eugenics is the history of simple people thinking that simple correlations could explain the world. So it goes: if poor people tend to be mentally inferior than we’ll have a smarter society if we eliminate the poor. Oh what’s that? The poor are disproportionally colored too? Yeah I guess we should get rid of them too then. Context and reality? Too messy. TLDR.

Does brain size even matter? Why didn’t whales – with their much larger brains – create the iPhone? Neurologically speaking, we don’t know shit about how the brain actually works and adapts. We’re still just poking stuff and seeing what happens. The console.log approach.

To lighten the mood a bit, lets say you design something that, I don’t know, makes it easy for people to write cool web apps. It’ll only be a matter of time before,

Hey listen. Google Analytics told me that people who use [Esoteric Feature X] are 200% more likely to upgrade their account. So if we make sure everyone knows about it we’ll get twice as much money!

Um, we made [Esoteric Feature X] for people who aren’t our core user group and have a special workflow. It isn’t really relevant to most users.

Yeah, but no. Money son!

*Makes Feature X shout at users to use it*. Most people ignore it and nothing changes, except now the interface is worse because relevant features are harder to find.

This doesn’t mean we can’t ever know things. Actually, you can know the most important thing: what are people trying to get done with your product?

👷 “I’m a carpenter, I use this saw to cut wood to the right size”

🙋 “I’m a developer, I use HyperDev to get my ideas on the internet”

🐴 “I’m a horse, I wear this saddle so people can ride on me without their balls hurting”

Your cool product may do lots of things and have lots of features, but there’s always a core job-to-be-done that people are there for.

Correlations and metrics can be handy (“Does anyone actually use Feature X?”). Design isn’t neuroscience though, we don’t have to poke and hope. We can mindfully help people do the job they want to do quickly, conveniently, and make them feel good about it. They’ll feel good about you too.

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