Gearious

A side project, an idea I carried for fourteen years, and a series of build notes about what happens when a designer who's been close to the code for most of his career finally gets the tools to do something about it.

An open-ended series · Updated as the project moves

Check Out Gearious!

the series

I'm building a planning app for adventure motorcycle riders. It's called Gearious. It started its life as a backpacking idea in 2011, when I weighed all of my gear on a kitchen scale and sketched a wall of interface ideas on a conference-room whiteboard, then sat in a folder for about a decade while I waited for either my engineering skills or the tools available to me to catch up. The tools, it turns out, were going to get there first.

This is a series of writing about that. Some of it is product thinking. Some of it is design work. Some of it is what an experienced designer looks like when he finally has the tools that let him build the thing he's been carrying around in his head, and is figuring out what that means about the job he thought he had. The series isn't a tutorial and it isn't a manifesto. It's a working log, written in the open, by someone learning as he goes — and willing to admit it.

The posts below are the ones up so far. More will land as the project moves and as there's something worth writing about. The order below is reading order; each post stands on its own, but they build.

the posts

01 — Fourteen Years to a Wireframe

The origin story. Backpacking, a kitchen scale, a wall of sketches in a conference room, the slightly embarrassing number of cooking stoves I once owned, and the afternoon a tool I'd been openly skeptical of for years handed me a clickable wireframe in a single sitting.

→ /writing/gearious/origin.html

02 — Learning to Talk to the Robots

What happened when I sat down to actually use the tools. Figma Make and the blank canvas it was built to defeat. Cursor and the prompt that took a week to write. The afternoon I had one AI help me write a prompt for another AI, fully expecting some sort of dimensional rift.

→ /writing/gearious/tools.html

03 — The Foundations Week

The two mentors who told me what I needed to hear, the long stretch of evenings I spent in conversation with Claude building a real set of foundation documents, and the realization that somewhere in the middle of it I'd started playing every role of a small product team.

→ /writing/gearious/foundations

04 — The Landing Page That Made It Real

Letting go of the pixels at a level I hadn't yet. Working the voice and tone before the visuals. The mini interactive feature that took many evenings to build and probably did more for the page than any amount of static polish would have. The page going live, and Gearious officially becoming A Thing On The Internet.

→ /writing/gearious/landing-page

05 — Turning Documents Into Instructions

The step between having a stack of good foundation documents and writing a line of code — where I learned those documents, as good as they were, had been written for the wrong audience, and what I built instead.

→ /writing/gearious/steering-docs