Today’s “best practices” have us trapped in the past. It’s time to get back to the future.

After working as both a designer and lead developer in digital agencies over the last 10 years for world class brands like Nike and Honda, I've seen the massive amounts of wasted time and inefficiencies caused by doing things a certain way, just because that’s the way we did them yesterday.

If the endless meetings, Slack channels, Zoom calls, emails, Agile™ garbage, and everything else in between that distracts us from doing what we were hired for wasn't enough; our workflows in general, and how we think about design and development specifically, are not working properly.

Even if you can't explain why, just like being in “The Matrix” or “The Truman Show”, you've probably felt that something isn't quite right — just as I did.

Hypermatic Shadow Crew.

We are constantly bombarded with the propaganda that “things are moving so fast” and “we can't even keep up with all the rapid technological progress”, but this is actually a lie that we tell each other; as one does not need to look very hard to realise that these soundbites are simply not true. Certainly, when it comes to the design and development process, things have actually not changed very much at all.

“We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”

— Christof, The Truman Show

Searching for hidden truths.

Stemming from using photo editing software to design things for the web, the “handover” process between designers and developers has remained largely unchanged for over 20 years. We desperately need to get back to the future, but I think things are moving way too slowly. Worse still, very few people seem to mind or even be thinking about it.

Because of this status quo, where the source of truth for designers is pixels and the source of truth for developers is code, most people believe that we need to “bridge the gap” between design and development; but I believe that the distance between design and production should be zero.

Nothing's equivalent, to the New York State of Mind.

We will start by releasing automation tools which solve common time wasting tasks faced by designers, developers and copywriters in most teams, followed by solving much bigger and more complex problems beyond those. We want to build the best products to solve important problems that very few people seem to be working on.

I am very optmistic that a much needed new future can be achieved, and I'm excited about the years ahead as we work towards our mission of reducing the distance between design and production to zero.

We won't be saving anything for the swim back.