Notes on Craft and Quality

01. INTRODUCTION

Like most designers, I couldn't get enough of the Jony Ive Stripe Session interview from a few weeks ago. The whole thing was a masterclass in design philosophy.

• Progress requires conviction and vision; it's not inevitable
• Simplicity and joy are essential to design
• Good design has to actually work, otherwise it's ugly

All great stuff. But one line stood out to me more than the others:

“What we make stands testament to who we are.”

I can't stop thinking about this.

It's one of those insanely simple ideas with an incredible depth.

What we make—music, paintings, software, products—speaks to who we are, what we value.

If we make software but it's ugly and unintuitive, it says that craft doesn't matter. It says we care about function and productivity but we don't care about our product bringing the person joy. It says we don't mind if they have to read some support docs and send us a support email. Plainly, it says we don't care.

However, when we sweat the details with small animations, intuitive UIs, thoughtful DX, progressive disclosure, tasteful use of color, and approachable layouts, we show that we care, most of all, about them. We make the software in a way that doesn't make people feel incompetent, but empowered. We make the software in a way that brings delight. We make software that looks beautiful and works well.

This, of course, lines up with what we believe as Christians. God created the vast and beautiful universe. He crafted every detail. He designed creation to work and make sense. And then he empowered us to steward his creation. To cultivate the earth. To do to it what he did to the universe. And we do this with our craft, our creativity, and our thoughtfulness.

It is theological for us to make something beautiful. We do it because we're commissioned to. We do it because the output leads to goodness. We do it because we care about the people on the other side. We also do it because in the act of making, we learn something about God. We learn something about creation. We learn something about ourselves.

There's another reason why craft matters, though. With the advent of the vibe coders, any feature is now just a prompt away. Features that used to be your moat no longer are. We'll see a cheaper copy-cat of every app out there over the next few years.

With that moat gone, the only two left are existing marketshare and craft. I don't have much to say on the former, I only just launched a product after all. But the latter? Well, that's something that every builder and maker has control over. You can choose to sweat the details. You can choose to pay attention to the small things. You can choose to be empathetic in how you design features and interfaces.

Craft and quality matter because it reflects who we are, it serves people well, and it honors God, but it's also just good business. (Funny how God's way tends to work out well practically… you'd think it's designed that way.)

As I've built and continue to build Church Space, there have been many companies who embody these values and have inspired me to build beautiful software. Here are a few:

Linear is the definition of a company who cares. A lot can be learned from just clicking around their app.

The founds of Midday, Pontus Abrahamsson and Viktor Hofte, are incredibly helpful with what they share on Twitter. They've shaped a lot of the design and tech stack of Church Space.

I cannot imagine using a Mac without Raycast. From window management, clipboard history, and snippets to the Linear, Svgl, and Shell extensions, I'm constantly opening Raycast and using key commands set in it throughout my day.

It's fun following their socials too. Their core product doesn't really have that much flashy UI that can be shared, but they still put out stunning work. And Pedro will one day be a case study in how to build a community around a product.

The Browser Company knows how to build beautiful products that bring delight. While it's been a rough ending, Arc rethought what a browser was and could be. It made me and thousands of others care deeply about something they never thought about before. And Dia has been an excellent experience so far. It feels fast and polished (even though it's in beta). I've also learned a lot about novelty fatigue from what they've shared.

Arc Search is another great example of thinking through a product from first principles. They didn't try to recreate a desktop browser on mobile. Instead, they stepped back and thought through the primary way a user uses a mobile browser: search. So building the app to make searching as easy and fast as possible was the perfect move.

The founders were acquired by Notion, and the product has been sunset. Nevertheless, Campsite was a great example of a well crafted all-in-one app. I'm a big fan of this graphic they had on their landing page at one point.

Notion is a complex product and yet it's so easy to use. They've mastered progressive disclosure.

They're also becoming more and more of an all-in-one app: notes, forms, databases, email, calendar, scheduling, and with the acquisition of the Campsite founders, I would guess Slack-like messaging isn't far away.

Fey is another company with great founders and beautiful design.

Another good one.

I love their unique design. I also quite often think about an email they sent announcing that they're lowering pricing. Not often you get that email from a company. Won a lot of goodwill from me.

Before Tana had a proper mobile app, they had Tana Capture. It let you input things to your Tana account on the go through voice, text, images, and files. It was a simple app, but it was a great example of thinking through what you can do now and what people actually need before you get to the point of building out the full vision of what you want.

CONCLUSION

If you have any other companies you think of as great examples of craft and quality, send them to me at hey@thomasharmond.com.