Ideas That Didn’t Ship
These days we have a lot of great resources to quickly and easily actualise our wildest creative visions. T-shirts, stickers, magazines, apps. If you build it, they will share it on twitter, and if you’re lucky, buy it too.
In the digital space, it can be a bit of a circle jerk, with stuff like Cost management for people who live together, and Tinder for investors, thanks to Product Hunt and the silicon valley maxim “real artists ship”.
The reality is a bit more grey. Not many people are making money. Elevator pitches are laughably un-creative. And success, no matter how hard we try to quantify, or how many listicles are written is invariably out of reach for most of us.
Those are all good excuses, but the truth is most of my ideas below are not intrinsically good enough for me to invest more time or any money in them.
Here are the ideas I didn’t/couldn’t do anything with this year.
• An app that gives basic nutritional breakdowns for any food considered a snack. (mockup)
• Famous creative directors, artists, filmakers etc donate their throwaway sketches. Blank Notebooks are created interspersed with these sketches, and themed to different creative industries. eg. ‘the app designer’, or ‘the copywriter’.
• Truth Cards - The meaning of life, in the form of a tarot/loteria card. Each card features a quote or thought from a famous philosopher, writer, artist or scientist.
• Advertising Ambience - Juniors who aspire to get a job, freelancers who work from home can make stuff to the background noise of famous ad agencies, shared working spaces and tech incubators.
• A short term budget app. Input your daily spendings, and you’re either under or over your daily budget. Your expense log is wiped at the end of each day.
• Tough guys (famous or not), with earrings. (mockup)
• Non-fiction book title generator. Most non-fiction books have a 2 part title, bot mixes and matches common keywords to create new book titles.
• Snoop dogg tweets as joint papers. (mockup)
• An app that displays a leaderboard of friends you last saw or interacted with in real life. Set reminders to catch up and quickly visualise who you haven’t caught up with for while.
• Soccer player jerseys of famous philosophers, artists, writers. (mockup Botticelli/Italy)
*This post was inspired by Zac Martin’s ’Ideas from 2014 that didn’t happen.’