An Interview with Tom Giannattasio, a Founder of Macaw
Macaw made waves last year when it raised $275,000 on Kickstarter. It was born out of a personal problem that the founders, Tom Giannattasio and Adam Christ, shared.
In our interview, Tom talks about letting the community lead the product, responsive design changing the requirements for modern design tools, and never quitting.
What is Macaw and what does it do?
Macaw is a new breed of web design tool, which allows you to work on a canvas much like Photoshop. However, that canvas is actually a web browser.
As you design, Macaw is automatically generating the HTML and CSS necessary for your design. It’s not your typical WYSIWYG, though. Macaw has a custom coding engine – called Alchemy – which follows the same logic a developer would use to write semantic HTML and succinct CSS.
What was the moment you decided to start working on Macaw? Who was there, where were you physically at? When was that?
It all started when my daughter was born and I was home on paternity leave. Between swaddles, I found time to tinker with a few ideas. One of them was Macaw. It was just meant to be a small side project, but I realized how many problems a tool like this could solve and I quickly became obsessed with it.
How long did it take you to build your first prototype? What was the length of time between idea to getting something in customers' hands?
I spent about four months working nights and weekends before I showed it to anyone. My partner, Adam Christ, was the first to see it and he decided to help out. We thought we’d finish it with another three to five months of work, which was pretty naïve on our part. It took well over a year to finish and launch.
My wife was ready to kill me.
What's your favorite tool you use to build Macaw?
My first instinct is to say Sublime Text. It's far and away the best text editor I've ever used. However, Macaw wouldn't exist if it weren't for Chromium.
We played around with numerous platforms before finding our groove with Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). It's crazy to think how powerful browsers are becoming. I think we're going to see more and more of our favorite apps rebuilt on an HTML-based stack.
What is the most challenging thing about developing tools for the design community? How have you overcome those challenges?
Designing a tool for designers to design with is equally awesome and difficult. Our community is very tech savvy and most of them have built apps themselves, so they're always happy to point out things we could be doing better.
It's incredibly helpful that our audience is preprogrammed to help make our product better. We're building something really complex and we need their help to get everything right. That being said, we’re also building an app that many people have thought about building themselves. So, they're quite opinionated about how it should work. Many voices can make it difficult to identify features that are crucial for the overall vision.
What do you think are the biggest challenges designers face today?
Dealing with a medium that is constantly evolving, which is why we're building Macaw.
Designing for the web has never been more complex. For the first two decades of web design, things stayed pretty much the same. We did mostly fixed-width layouts, which could be easily mocked in Photoshop. Then, it came down to mastering layout properties and learning the ins-and-outs of each browser.
The past few years have brought us tremendous growth in browser capabilities and even more in design thinking. Responsive design brought an enlightenment of our medium. People are finally treating the web in a different way than the way we treated print, and browser manufacturers are constantly improving the underlying technology so we can do more and more.
As a designer, keeping up with these changes can be overwhelming.
What do you believe are some of your biggest failures?
I don’t know if I’d call it a failure, but jumping in head first with Macaw was a tough thing to do. It felt like a failure for a long time. The product took a long time to develop and we didn’t take investment. Watching our family’s savings wither away month after month was really discouraging and there were many times that I wanted to quit.
I wouldn’t change a thing about the journey, though. I learned more in that one year than I did in the entirety of my career – not just about design and development, but about business, life, and family.
What advice would you have to anyone looking to develop applications or services for designers?
Do it! The design community is an incredible group of people. I feel honored to be building things for them. It’s a unique situation to find yourself in, because your audience is also inherently capable of identifying problem areas with the product and they’re usually willing to help you resolve things.
This is a blessing and a curse, because you’ll be held liable for every design mistake made. That’s a good thing; it’s humbling and you can learn a lot from your audience. The community guides most of the product direction for Macaw. So, I guess my advice is to engage the community because they’ll make the product much better than you can alone.
Has there been a watershed moment in the product? What was it?
There have been many. Kickstarter was the most meaningful moment for the company and for me personally, but the largest moment for the product is taking place right now. We're in the midst of some major product initiatives.
It's still a little early for us to say too much about what we’re developing, but I can say that we've cracked numerous things that we didn't even think would be possible. We can't wait to share them with the community!
Who is your favorite person to follow on Twitter?
I follow the typical list of designers and developers, but one of my favorite people on Twitter is neither: @brainpicker. Brain Pickings is easily one of my top sites as it covers a ton of awesome, nerdy stuff: creativity, life and science.
If you would like to learn more about Macaw, you can do so easily on their site.
If you liked this interview, you will also like the other interviews we've done with creators of design-centric software.
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