![]() ![]() For something to be well designed, the foundational decisions need to be treated as design decisions. When they try to take it seriously, it’s usually something like “Ok, we’ve got our product, but now we need design”. The example set by Apple from the iMac onward has been hugely influential to me, but I think most companies (even those that claim to be design-driven) don’t quite get it. I thought Apple gave everyone permission to take design seriously, but it hasn’t happened to the extent that I expected. What do you think the biggest challenges facing designers are today? Having Kaz as a partner has been really helpful, he keeps going when I freak out, and he has a great deal of experience starting businesses. The biggest challenge for me has been all the standard things that come along with starting a business. What is the most challenging thing about developing tools for the design community? How have you overcome those challenges?Ĭhallenges? It’s been a joy! It’s probably one of the best communities to build tools for because designers tend to be up on the latest technologies (we barely think about IE) and they are all over Twitter which makes getting the word out about cool new products much easier! Designers are very comfortable with web based tools and subscription software. It’s been tough putting up with all the bugs and glitches, but thankfully Pieter has his priorities straight and is focused on making the app stable before going crazy with new features. After a week I had converted entirely to using Sketch for Flinto’s UI. So it was a big deal for me in early 2013 when I came across Sketch in the Mac App Store and gave it a spin. I’ve used Photoshop nearly every day of my adult life. My dad first showed me Photoshop when I was seven years old. What’s your favorite tool you use to build Flinto? I spent two of those months living in Tokyo, because, why not? It’s an inspiring place to be, and we reached a significant milestone by the end of my stay there when we replaced the existing Flinto app with our rebuilt version and started private beta testing with the existing users. Nearly four years after building the first version for students, I partnered with Kaz and we spent six months rebuilding Flinto before launching it publicly. I continued to use it on my own projects, as did some former students and friends. I spent a lot of time on it, but I got caught up with other things and never launched it. Before long it had a robust interface and was self-hosted.Īfter teaching a second session of the course, I decided to turn Flinto into a commercial product. It was great having a classroom full of testers! Their feedback was so encouraging that I continued to spend my evenings refining the tool. I built the first version of Flinto in a couple of nights. How long did it take you to build your first prototype? What was the length of time between idea to getting something in customers’ hands? ![]() I often thought about the design of an app that would let me bust out tappable prototypes of these flows, and I was frustrated that such a tool didn’t exist. As I designed features, I would consider the flows and interactions first. I was working as the designer of Echofon, the popular Twitter client created by my now-cofounder Kazuho Okui. ![]() I actually had the idea for Flinto a year earlier, but didn’t have an excuse to build it. ![]() I thought it would be such a shame if the students didn’t have an interactive prototype that ran on their iPhone at the end of the course, so I hacked together a tool for them to use. In 2010 I taught the world’s first (maybe) iPhone UI design course at California College of the Arts. What was the moment you decided to start working on Flinto? Who was there, where were you physically at? When was that? Nathan talks with us about first starting off, his early fascination with Photoshop, and some of the lessons designers fail to learn. We’ve run into Nathan a few times over the past few years, and we thought he would be a great first interview. Flinto is a service for prototyping iOS and Android designs. One of them is Nathan Manousos, a co-founder of Flinto. We’re beginning an experiment where we interview the creators of design applications. An Interview with Nathan Manousos, a Founder of Flinto ![]()
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