The challenge with being early to a market is that there are not as many examples to learn from. We took inspiration from the 60s, 70s and 80s work in creative computer science, cybernetics, and human centric “augmentation“, rather than automation, today’s computational creativity, as well as the history and practices of the big design behemoths as Adobe, and forward-thinking design firms like IDEO and Frog Design.
While we successfully build some interesting technology, and conducted a lot of user testing and product experimentation, if we’re very honest with ourselves we have to admit that we never really managed to turn our efforts into a single engaging and enjoyable product. Instead we found ourselves helping agencies, designers, and brands as a service consultancy, effectively transitioning partly into an agency for creative work “dog-fooding” our internal tools, but without a real urgency about putting these tools out for a wider audience: a clear lack of product focus.
This, combined with disagreements about strategy and business focus with (now former) two other cofounders, made it a difficult journey for everyone involved.
In short: it’s time to call it a day, and move on. We — I speak now for me, Sam and Tero — still very strongly belief that the new growing field of Creative AI is an exciting opportunity for developing human-centric technologies, products, services, and tools that aid creatives everywhere. And for myself I can say, perhaps a bit more humility and focus as well 🙂
This all doesn’t mean that it has been a total waste. A lot of people working at creative.ai have told me in person that is has been the most intense, but also the most transforming experience of their career: many have found passions to pursue or career switches to make (designers turning developer, data scientists turning artists, etc), by and large made possible through the supporting culture we build all of us working together.
Next to this we have dreamed up, and developed many interesting “new” (new as in unlike what’s around today, but not as much new for those willing to look back a couple of decades, to the early computing pioneers for example) ways of building user interfaces, interfacing with tools, or ui/ux principles and designs.
In what follows a couple of our experiments and projects we’ve worked on the past two years, many of which we will make available as open source projects for anyone to tinker with. Some of these are rough ideas or prototypes from design sprints or our Friday “hack days”, some were possible product ideas, and the last one Bloma which we had in “alpha” for a while and which we’re making available as an open source project)