Pinocchio · I Bet on the Browser (2016)

In 2016 the design tool lived on your desktop, and that was simply the natural order of things. I thought the arrangement was temporary, so I built the other thing: a prototyping tool that runs in the browser and works under your fingers. Solo, design and code. The industry spent the next six years proving the thesis, and seeing where the tools are going is a habit rather than a fluke.

It started while I was contemplating the first versions of apps like InVision and Sketch, in a world where Figma did not exist for anybody yet. Pinocchio is a web-based prototyping tool whose UX walks away from common desktop patterns on purpose, so that somebody holding a touchscreen is a first-class citizen instead of an afterthought. It remains a challenging exercise of creating UI to create UI.

The bet

Think about where design lived in 2016. Sketch was an application you installed, on a Mac, because those were the terms. InVision took the static screens you had already drawn and made them clickable afterwards, which was genuinely useful and also an admission that the drawing and the behavior were two separate worlds. Photoshop and Illustrator were, well, Photoshop and Illustrator. And Figma did not exist.

I kept looking at that arrangement and finding it temporary. Not because I had any inside information, I had none, but because everything else had already moved. The mail moved to the browser, the documents moved, the photos moved, the code reviews moved. So why would the one artifact that most needs two people looking at the same thing at the same time be the last holdout sitting on somebody's hard drive?

That was the whole bet, and it was not a complicated one. It was just early. So I built the thing, because a bet you do not build is only an opinion. Here it is, drawing and prototyping inside a browser tab, in 2016.

Prototyping walkthrough

The list I put myself next to

Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator and XD. That is what I benchmarked against, which is a humbling list to place a solo side project beside, and also the only honest one. If you are going to claim the tools are moving, you do not get to measure yourself against the easy ones.

Touch-first, which nobody was asking for

Here is the part that made it hard, and the part I would still defend. A tool built for a mouse quietly assumes a pointer one pixel wide, a right click, a hover state, and a keyboard sitting under your other hand. Take those four things away and roughly half of the interactions in a design tool simply collapse. Precision selection collapses. Contextual menus collapse. Every shortcut collapses.

So Pinocchio's UX diverges from the desktop grammar deliberately, to make room for fingers. That is why it looks a little strange next to the tools it benchmarks against, and the strangeness is the point rather than an accident. Nobody was asking for this in 2016. Watch anybody try to design on a tablet today and tell me it was the wrong question.

The same tool, under a thumb

What the bet was worth

In 2022, Adobe offered twenty billion dollars for Figma: a design tool that lives in a browser, where several people work on the same file at the same time. Regulators killed that deal, so Figma went public on its own instead, and the market liked it even more. The thesis was right. I was early, alone, and one company short, which is a fine joke to tell on yourself.

Do I bring this up to claim I invented something? No. Pinocchio was a side project and Figma is a company, and those are not the same species. I bring it up because reading where the tools are going, and then building the thing to find out if you are right, is a habit I have kept for twenty years, and the habit is the transferable part. The tool is just the receipt.