Design Work Life: Cataloging Inspiration Daily

In the cou­ple of weeks since its launch, Squarespace Note has received quite a bit of pos­i­tive buzz in the design and tech com­mu­ni­ties. If you haven’t caught on, Squarespace Note is a clean, min­i­mal­ist note tak­ing app that gives you the abil­ity to push notes on the go to email, Evernote, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, and Squarespace.

Today we have the oppor­tu­nity to hear from the designer of the app, Grant Gold, about the think­ing and process behind its devel­op­ment. Below you’ll see com­men­tary directly from Grant, inter­spersed with screen­shots and design details from the app itself.

Take it away, Grant!

Most To Do or note tak­ing apps require you to change your behav­ior, chang­ing behav­iors like this require a lot of prac­tice and per­sis­tence. Squarespace Note fol­lows a behav­ior you already do, but also removes a step. We all check our email… a lot of us send emails to our­selves, but have to go through open­ing an email, fill­ing in our email address, writ­ing it out, hit­ting send. Squarespace Note takes no more than writ­ing out the thought. It’s a very small removal of a step, but it’s just enough to make you jot down that stu­pid idea that, with a bit of later noodling, turns into some­thing great.

I don’t like to make up new inter­ac­tions, I like to design in the mind­set that even if one don’t know any stan­dard inter­ac­tions one will likely try a cer­tain “thing.” In the note app, “swipe up to send” is an exam­ple of that. Consider where all apps put their “send” but­ton, it’s either on the top or bot­tom (under the key­board). If you type some­thing and don’t know what to do next because there are absolutely no con­trols on the screen, you’re likely to scroll up or down, and in doing so reveal­ing the inter­ac­tion. In other words I didn’t have to make any­one learn any­thing, they taught themselves.

People often claim that inter­ac­tions like this are not “intu­itive”. Although, swipe to delete, pull down to refresh, and long-press weren’t intu­itive until a lot of apps began to use them… then it made per­fect sense. At one time open­ing a mag­a­zine and scan­ning the copy and images in the right order and know­ing innately where to find some­thing was also not very intu­itive. Behaviors like these are what I and most design­ers mold with. When they are always con­sis­tent, inter­ac­tions can be beau­ti­fully simple.

This is one in a suite of apps i designed for Squarespace, from orig­i­nal con­cepts and mocks to icon and inter­ac­tion design, copy­writ­ing, ani­ma­tion, and beta test­ing. The con­cept behind the apps is one of com­plete and absolute sim­plic­ity. Building the apps that would more beau­ti­fully match Apple’s stripped down, indus­trial design.

Another thing no one seems to be talk­ing about on design blogs is a fea­ture I built in after using the app in a movie the­ater. It was glar­ingly bright in such a dark room, but I needed to write down this thought. I spent a lot of time dou­bling all the assets of the app to make a dark ver­sion. After sun­set the app will go into dark mode, also shak­ing the app at any­time switches it from light to dark and vice-versa.

Thanks so much for your insight Grant!