It’s been three weeks since Phuket, and progress has definitely slowed down. As expected, coming back from holiday meant jet lag, work and the rest of life all landing at once, and GridCollector slid down the list. But it’s the long Easter weekend, so it’s time to get back on track.
Over the holiday I was so excited about all the nerdy parts, the database, the information architecture, how everything fits together, and I was really happy with the progress. Then I started showing it to people, who were a lot less excited about all the functional things I had vibe coded, and instead mostly commented on how it looked. What I had not noticed with my nerdy blinders on was that the whole app was in the same default navy blue and white that every AI tool seems to reach for, which was a pretty uninspiring look. So it was time to put my designer hat on.
The first question was what GridCollector should feel like. Collecting is a hobby people do out of love, and collectors are quite self-aware about it. They will joke about spending so much money on “shiny cardboard”, while also treating it as an investment, doing deals and keeping an eye on what holds value. They are also very organised, sorting binders by collection and building incredibly impressive Excel spreadsheets to log every detail. So we wanted it to feel premium, but quietly premium: functional, with just enough design to make it enjoyable to use, but nothing frilly or loud that steals attention, so the focus stays on the cards. After a bit of trial and error, that landed on black with gold accents, which is very classic and deliberately doesn’t stand out. There are small touches of Formula 1 colour and spirit thrown in too, without it turning into a rainbow.
The other thread this weekend was sharing. The utility side, collecting and browsing, is mostly there, so the question became what makes this special. Formula 1 card collecting is very community-driven, and somewhere down the line we might explore this angle a little more, but we are not ready to build an in-app community from day one. So the baby step for now is making it easy to share outside the app, which is useful for collectors and also a bit of free marketing for us. There is the show-off kind of sharing, where users can share a page of their binders as an image. And there is the utility kind. Collectors already post in WhatsApp groups and Discord servers looking for specific cards, so if they’re already keeping their wanted list in GridCollector, one tap now turns it into a list they can post anywhere.