I remember discovering a glossy orange box of drug-store color prints, jammed overfull, stuffed with the condensed photos of my father’s life. They were high up on a shelf in the back of the entryway closet of my parents’ home. I eagerly pulled it down and started flipping through undersaturated, fading color snapshots. Even the negatives had started to fade.

My father died when I was young and these had likely been in the box since then. I knew sunlight was bad for photos but these hadn’t been in the sun and yet they were still fading away. The contents of a half lifetime of moments, crammed into a shoebox in the back of a closet. And even then they were fading away.

I had already begun to save my photos in similar shoeboxes piling up in my closet, labeled by year — the accreted evidence of my own photography practice. I carried them around with me for a while, shifting them from closet to closet when I moved. But after finding the orange box, I started the long process of making digital scans before my own prints and negatives started to fade.

A black box of silver halide prints

I remember finding a matte black, two inch thick, box at my grandmother’s house. It was filled with black and white 8×10 silver halide prints. These prints are made by exposing the negative to a timed blast of light through the negative on a kind of reverse camera called an enlarger. In the darkroom, the paper serves as the film in this operation. Little photosensitive silver halide crystals in the paper absorb the light but don’t start to change until you submerge the paper in the developer chemical. Then you can see the ghostly images slowly grow in contrast under the red light bulbs who don’t effect the paper. Next you move the print to the stop bath to stop the developer from further darkening the print. Finally a couple minutes in the fixer to freezes everything in place and preserves the print you made. Hang it up to dry and these photos can last over 100 years.

My grandfather had shot and developed these in his home darkroom. A lifetime of photographic practice collected into 100 prints in a matte black box. I flipped through them hoping to learn about this other man who died before I got to know him, let alone share his love of photography. I expected his prints would have held up better. But whether it was the home mixed chemicals or something about his process, these photos too were fading.

Hard drives are sand paintings

I’ve been taking photos intentionally since 1999 when I was a senior in high school and won a local contest with a photo of a Lynyrd Skynyrd tape in a drainage ditch. For the last 17 years I’ve shot mostly digital. And in the past few years I’ve shared nearly six thousand of them on Instagram. I flip back through them sometimes when I feel down and remember the good times I’ve had. But it’s a solo, private review.

I often wonder what my family will find of my work when I die. They won’t find any shoeboxes. And if I’m not careful they won’t find any digital files either. Hard drives are like sand paintings: the slightest electrical or magnetic breeze can destroy them. Even if the digital media survive there has to be software left to read the particular file formats they are saved in. No one will find my photos in the back of a closet.

I once joined a conversation among librarians and engineers from Google about the most reliable way to transmit information across very large long time scales. They insisted that google’s strategy of using hard drives with thousands of copies spread across the planet was the most foolproof plan. Despite social collapse, nuclear holocaust, or natural disaster some copies would survive.

I said then as I say now, that the only proven method for transmitting information across very large time scales is religion. Religion creates text and then those texts create communities around them that reproduce and expand on the text. Without a community to carry your words or art or photos forward through time they will fade.

Telling the family origin stories

This Christmas I’ve been trying to make time to tell the origin stories of our family to our three daughters. Stories of early jobs, dates, international travel, proposals and struggles to find work and meaning. These girls, raised in close proximity with iPhones, keep asking for photos of these formative events. Fortunately I can still pull up most of them as digital scans of mostly negatives I shot before the digital era. “You have to write these down!” My oldest daughter exclaimed repeatedly as we told the stories of the hilarious and harrowing experiences that formed her mother and I.

I used to think I wanted to make my mark on the universe, to prove that I existed and that my life mattered. But that’s a very present focused ambition. Now, I’m increasingly focused on joining my mark to what came before and what will be coming after.

What makes religious or familial communities survive beyond one generation is that the stories they tell and retell help those presently living make sense of their experience and orient themselves in the world in context of a lineage larger then their own life and experience. Either they do this job well enough to get passed on or they fade and are forgotten.

The only way to keep the stories of our lives from fading is by joining them to a larger story that helps those who come after us know a little bit more about who they are and who they could be.

I never got to hear the stories that went with the photos my father and grandfather shot. I’ve had to piece together who they were and who I am with a sparse few stories cherished from family members and a few more stolen from people who knew then and were generous enough to share any memories they had.

The gift I want to give my children is a story, with a some context for the kinds of people from whom they come and the kinds of people they might become.

Photos always fade. But stories can make and re-make communities across thousands of years —but only if they help the hearers make sense of their own lived experience.

Let’s walk through them and remove these barriers to you getting started right now.

MYTH 1: THE IDEA IS THE HARD PART

There is a popular idea floating around that the big gap between nothing and success is having a good, new idea.  It’s true that good ideas, new insights, often at the intersection of divergent perspectives or new experience colliding with established wisdom produce innovation.  However in my experience, the big gap is not between nothing and a good idea. It’s between the good idea and the execution of that idea.  Or what Seth Godin calls “shipping the work,” that is, breaking the good idea down into an executable project, saying publicly you are working on it, owning all the pieces and getting it done.  So if you have a good idea, don’t go looking for an app maker to make it for you.  Instead, download Seth’s Ship It Journal PDF and fill it in.

MYTH 2: I NEED A DEVELOPER BEFORE I CAN START

This one is very popular and couldn’t be more wrong.  Developers are in the business of taking vague ideas and thinking through them to such painful, specific clarity that they can make computers behave in ways humans find predictable and delightful.  But they can’t do that before you have at least mapped out the basics of how you want the app to work.  Actually, they can, but there will be a huge undefined space of un-thought-through assumptions that they will have to make specific decisions about.  And those decisions will differ from your expectations in important ways resulting in everyone being frustrated.  The whole process of product design and development can be reduced down to minimizing the gap of ambiguity between the idea in your head and the idea in the head of the people who will actually make it work.

The good (and terrifying) news is that you don’t need anything but your ideas, a pencil, and a ruler to start making your idea real.

Draw out each screen of the app on paper, the actual size it will be and then write notes around it describing what each button does.  Do one sheet per screen and don’t use Lorem Ipsum or placeholder text.  The process of thinking what each button and interface item would say will bring more clarity to your idea.  This should take about a half an hour per screen.  I can hear you protesting, “but I can’t draw a straight line.”  That’s what the ruler is for.

Many people like to do this kind of sketching and prototyping in Powerpoint or Keynote. Others jump straight to design tools like Sketch App or Adobe XD.  But I find that the first step on paper forces me to find the most critical details and not get distracted fiddling with colors or type.

Don’t worry about whether your idea is technically possible or not.  That’s for your eventual developer partners to help you answer.  And they can’t answer it with precision if you don’t have it thought out and documented with precision.  Focus on how you would want it to work in your best possible scenario.  Don’t be afraid to borrow elements from other apps.  The more your app conforms to conventional use of navigation, menus, buttons, icons and settings, the easier it will be for new users to grasp.

The best part about moving past this myth is that it means there are no excuses.  There is always pencil and paper and your idea.  Even on a plane.  Or at night when you can’t sleep. Or visiting family over the holidays.https://www.youtube.com/embed/WfSlm3rphSo?feature=oembed&showinfo=0&rel=0&modestbranding=1

Once you have a sketch, there are good tools like InVision that will enable you to take cell-phone photos of your drawings and turn them into clickable, working prototypes– which you can share with a developer.  This prototype will help anyone you partner with be able to understand your idea a lot more quickly and enable them to estimate cost and time to make it for you much more accurately.

And, there are lots of sites like UpWork where there are developers waiting to help you take your concept further.  The closer you sketches and prototypes are to your vision the better their work will align to it and the faster and less frustrating the process will be for everyone.

But more importantly, this prototyping process will enable you to share your idea with people you know who you think would be likely to use your app.  This is critical because no matter how good your idea is, it needs validation with other people to justify the expense of creating it.  And if you pay attention when they try it out, you will get good feedback on how to make it simpler, more intuitive and maybe new features you hadn’t even thought of.

MYTH 3: I NEED AN APP, NOT A WEBSITE

Apps cost about 20x more to build and maintain than websites. And with great tools like Squarespace and WordPress available for cheap to free, you can do a lot even without programming ability.  Ask yourself:

What about your idea requires an app and not a website?

What job does the app do for the user?

Why would a user “hire” this app?

And why would they fire it?

Could a website do that job as well for a fraction of the cost?

Can I do a simpler version of my idea with a website that is responsive on phones and further validate my idea with users by deploying it as a website?

The truth is that most apps also have components served from the web anyway.  And a number of developers are making the argument that Progressive Web App architecture is likely the future of most app development.  You may need an app but then again you might not.  And it’s a lot faster and cheaper to confirm your idea has legs as a website or web app before committing to custom, native-coded apps for iOS and Android.

THIS IS THE FUN PART!

Time spent clarifying your ideas and validating your concept is the actual first step towards making your idea real.  As someone on the receiving end of these kinds of requests I can tell you, it’s the number one thing I look for to assess whether a person is going to be a good collaborator.

And when you’ve done that work, and you think you are ready to invite someone to join with you in bringing your idea into the world, sketching and prototyping are shorcuts to getting your idea across with precision.

This is actually the fun part!  You have an idea how to make the world better and a blank page.  Pick up a pencil!

You can read more about my app design process on CharacterMe, a brain training app for your character.