Pixate is a mobile interaction design service. It is being released from beta today. After a
successful Kickstarter campaign of its first product and another year of development, it’s here. Paul Colton, the founder and CEO of Pixate, agreed to do an interview here on the LayerVault blog.

Paul talks with us about YCombinator, distilling complicated problems into simple interfaces, and some of the challenges designers face today.

What is Pixate and what does it do?

Pixate, Inc. is a two -year -old, Y-Combinator and Accel Partners backed company that’s creating a mobile design platform through some really unique services.

What was the moment you decided to start working on Pixate? Who was there, where were you physically at? When was that?

I’m going to answer that with some background first. I’ve founded a couple of startups. First, in San Diego, California, was Live Software where I created JRun, the first commercial Java Servlet and JSP engine. It was self--funded and was eventually sold to Allaire Corporation. Allaire was bought by Macromedia, which was in turn bought by Adobe.

After that, I started Aptana, which was venture-funded. I had started that in San Diego but then moved to Silicon Valley to secure the funding. Aptana was focused on tooling for web application development. We had millions of downloads of our open--source IDE and we were eventually acquired by Appcelerator.

After that exit, I was kind of in a ‘neutral zone’. I knew mobile was picking up serious steam, but I just wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I had heard a lot about Y-Combinator (YC) and thought that maybe I should try something different this time, instead of self--funding or goingright to VC. I knew I wanted to do mobile, but exactly what wasn’t clear yet. YC was trying out a new “no idea” application, so I went for it.

This all took place in Palo Alto, where I had moved to in order to be as close to the white--hot core of Silicon Valley as I could. It didn’t hurt that Steve Jobs had lived a few blocks away from where I settled. I was accepted into YC after cramming for a week to build a demo app on iPad. It was my first iOS app, and I literally locked myself in a basement and didn’t come out for a week to get it done.

Once in YC, I had to decide what to actually build. And they wanted me to get a co-founder. I went back to one of my lead engineers at Aptana, Kevin Lindsey, and asked for him to join me. He did.

It looks like you come from a development background. How does that influence how you build Pixate? How is building tools for developers different from building tools for designers?

I am an engineer at heart, but like most of us, I know good design when I see it. I’m one of those that likes to be very close to good design, and I just code as close to it as I can. I was offered a job at Pixar back in the day to work on shaders and other coding tasks. I couldn’t take the job, but it felt good nonetheless.

My first two companies were squarely for developers. The first company was all about Java, the second was all about web. Pixate is indeed different in that it’s targeting a group of extremely bright and talented people, with a real gift for design, but most of them don’t want to code.

That’s actually a refreshing challenge for us: how can we take the most complex aspect of programming extremely rich interactions and animations on native mobile devices and make it super easy and intuitive? Designers want to be able to realize their creative ideasin as short a path as possible.

Unlike developers, it’s not about the best algorithm or most efficient code, but rather it’s about the biggest visual impact, the joy and delight they bring their users, all while keeping everything as clean as possible--. That’s their goal so in turn that’s our goal.

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?

Y-Combinator is really good about driving you to get a product out to market in a little time as possible. After all, you only have 90 days in the program, so you better not blow the opportunity. Pixate started with our now open--sourced Freestyle product, and our prototype took a couple of months. (We had to learn Objective--C in the process.) We worked tirelessly and went from inception to commercially available 1.0 product in about 6 months.

Our current product, which we’re just calling Pixate, is a mobile interaction design service. It took nearly a year to build and get to market. We learned a lot from Freestyle, but also had a lot more to learn to get a product out that touched web client, server, Android and iOS.

What’s your favorite tool you use to build Pixate?

Xcode and Sketch. I personally focus most of my development time on the iOS side of the product, so the boring answer is that I couldn’t have done it without Xcode. In terms of non--programming tooling, I appreciate the simplicity of Sketch and it’s clean user interface, definitely an inspiration for us.

What is the most challenging thing about developing tools for the design community? How have you overcome those challenges?

Simplicity.

Representing complex programming paradigms and concepts in a completely visual way is very difficult. Just look at tools like Quartz Composer, with all its power comes an extremely complex visual representation of that power. Sometimes a visual expression can be easier than code, but the opposite is also very true.

For example, a simple programming concept like “state” becomes tougher to cleanly represent visually. We’re doing our best to overcome these challenges by not rushing to solving them. That is, we want to take a very thoughtful approach to how hard problems might be solved visually, and we don’t want to rush or jump to conclusions.

What do you think the biggest challenges facing designers are today?

Being heard. I’ve heard a lot of stories in the last year talking to every major company that would take our meeting --and most did. I saw a lot of pain from product and design.

I want to empower designers to stand their ground. To say that something can be done, that it isn’t impossible from an engineering perspective. Pixate wants to shift the balance of power back towards design.

We want designers to be able to iterate infinitely more quickly than a developer can, and present an idea so close to completion, so full- fidelity, that there’s little doubt left about how should it work.

With Pixate, the designer can answer all of these questions, and more, before engineering ever get to it. The designer can be heard loudly and clearly.

What do you believe are some of your biggest failures?

Cutting my losses. Success comes through failure. The more you fail, the more you succeed. The longer you wait to fail, the fewer successes you’ll have. My biggest failure is not failing fast enough when I knew time was already up. My advice to anyone trying anything, fail, then try again.

What advice would you have to anyone looking to develop applications or services for designers?

Ease of use trumps features.

Has there been a watershed moment in the product? What was it?

Maybe at the risk of fan service, when we announced our
first private beta on Designer News this year on the same day that WWDC started, our post was number one, all day, on top of the WWDC news. That was a really big deal and exciting for us. It spotlighted us long enough for people to take notice.

Who is your favorite person to follow on Twitter?

Speaking of fanboy, I can’t get enough of John Gruber (
@gruber) and Daring Fireball (
@daringfireball). I follow both on Twitter and we’ve advertised with him several times. With his stuff, for me, more is more.

What has your favorite Designer News story been of all time?

I’d have to say that it’s the category of roundups that I enjoy the most. Whether it’s avatars or web site designs or even progress loading indicators, seeing the creativity that the community brings is always the best top to bottom reading I get.

That wraps up our interview with Paul. If you would like to check out
Pixate, head on over to the site to sign up.

In case you missed it, check out
last week’s interview with Nathan Manousos, a founder of Flinto.

As always, you can
discuss this post on Designer News.

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