Why I made Super Simple Draw and started drawing on iPad
Earlier this year, I made an iOS app called Super Simple Draw.
I am not an artist, nor am I good at drawing. So why did I choose to invest my time in drawing? Because Apple started selling iPad Pros with Apple Pencils, and that is a product searching for a use case, or a solution searching for a problem. No that’s not the real answer.
I might have started initially since I was so impressed by the really cool drawings by the artists. Then I thought that if I can practice and eventually get there, I can be as cool. Then I started trying to draw, and realized that this wasn’t the point. The true joy of drawing are somewhere else, and much bigger.
One is that drawing something makes you really looking at something carefully. Before practicing drawing, when I look at things, my brain tend to transform them into predefined symbols. Details are lost. Opinions are formed. A picture is reduced into a set of words before kept in memory, and some are not even true. When I started drawing stuff, I noticed so many things I never noticed before, and then started appreciating the effort of the designer, whether it is the nature or some human.
Another benefit of drawing is that it really helps you to focus. I know it’s just one of the things that can help you focus (others include writing, coding, or simply paying attention to breathing), but it still helps. For a moment I can stay out of distractions, and it somehow feels better afterwards than having played video games for 30 minutes. Or maybe drawing with its own difficulty and challenges can be considered as a game, except that there are no artificial flaws introduced by a game developer.
Then there is the journaling aspect. I could write diaries too, but when I use language, I tend to unintentionally become opinionated. Drawing on the other hand is more objective by design. I often try to draw things that I came across in real life, e.g. something mentioned in a book I just read, or a product I just bought and enjoyed using, or an object related to something I did or talked about with others. When I look back at all those pictures, it was a precious collection of things made me happy. And the lack of subjective description just made the memory more enjoyable.
Then why do I need to make an app instead of just downloading one made by some other better software developers? I actually did try a lot of them. Procreate, Autodesk Sketchbook, Adobe’s drawing apps, Concept, Apple Notes, Google Keep, etc, and then a long list of less famous simple drawing apps made by indie developers.
While a lot of them are great, they also have certain limitations. Some are designed for pros and a little too complicated for casual sketch, some are buggy, some don’t support the newer iOS technologies like multitasking, some are not dedicated to drawing (e.g. Apple Notes has quite nice and clean drawing tools, but I just didn’t want to mixup drawings with actual notes).
That is why I built Super Simple Draw. Available at
You can draw too.
Already drawing with some sophisticated tools? Then I won’t try selling to you. But if you are among the ones who think that you can’t draw, or can’t draw well. Then maybe Super Simple Draw is for you, since it’s simple, and designed to not overwhelm you. By default nothing gets saved, so you can just experiment. (If I were Yoda I’d say “try or try not, don’t do”.) No pressure, just have fun.
Moreover, the whole point is to just enjoy the process. I look at my bad drawings, perspectives were inconsistent, proportions were off, lines weren’t quite straight, and circles were never round. But I still like them. And I know over time I am very slowly getting better. Just trust the process. And trust me: even if you show people your bad drawings, people will still say oh that looks pretty good. People are nice.
Going forward I’ll use this space to share tips of using Super Simple Draw, or just my drawing experience in general. Also, would be nice to follow Super Simple Draw on instagram: http://instagram.com/supersimpledraw/
