The Record · 2026 · 2 min read
Putting It on the Record
Designed and built a game for friends, from its design tokens to App Store submission, in 8 weeks.
The challenge
My group chats are full of predictions: who'll be late, whether it rains on Sunday, who wins the game. Then the chat moves on, and nobody remembers who was right. The Record keeps score. It's a game to play with friends, not a gambling app: there's no money in it, only the bragging rights.
Rain showed me I could build an app. This time I wanted to be the full team: product, brand, design system, backend and the App Store. It has its own site at getontherecord.app.
The approach
Map, prototype, then build
Before any code, I mapped the whole app offline. Then I built a cheap HTML prototype of every screen and made it the source of truth: where the docs and the prototype disagreed, the prototype won. Only then did I build it for real in SwiftUI, and iterate.
Designing every token
I designed all of the design tokens: ember on ink for colour, one typeface for the wordmark, interface and numbers, and the radii, spacing and motion curves. Agents drew the illustrations, like the rubber stamp and the badges, in a palette from those tokens. Every screen is built from them.
A game, not gambling
There's no money, ever, and the words come from sports, not casinos. You join a League, make a pick, call it, and challenge a bad call, which the League then votes on. A win lands with a “Called it.” stamp, a streak and a place in the standings. I reviewed every detail of it myself.
Slow down to go fast
With agents, code was cheap and speed was the trap, so I had to slow down and be deliberate. I logged every decision, and nothing closed until I'd seen it running and approved it. A design-critic agent checked each screen against the prototype, and agent testers ran ten journeys as a somewhat lazy eighteen-year-old. The subagent's feedback was neutral and gave immediate guidance on where to improve the user journeys before getting in front of real people.
The impact
- From a map of the app to App Store submission in 8 weeks.
- Designed every design token, from colour and type to motion.
- On TestFlight and submitted to the App Store, waiting on review.