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Interview: Davey Heuser – Iconjar

Interview: Davey Heuser – Iconjar

Funny story: not so long ago, the guys from the IconJar app reached out to me asking for an interview. The funny part is that they contacted me on the exact same day I wrote a note for myself to do an interview with them in the future! What a crazy coincidence! So here we are. A two-way interview, so to speak.

For those who are wondering what IconJar is: it is an app that allows you to organize, search and use icons the easiest way. A great thing for anyone working with tons of icons and who are looking for a way to manage them all. Not only does it let you tag, arrange and search your icons more easily, but it also allows you to drag and drop icons into your favourite graphic design software. Check it out, it’s awesome!

But let’s jump straight into the interview!

Iconjar is an amazing product! Could you please present it to people who aren’t yet familiar with it? How does it make life easier for fellow designers?

Hey Justas, thanks for the kind words! We really appreciate it that you like our app. Iconjar gives people the ability to store all your icons in one place.

I came up with the idea for an icon catalogue when I was still using a Windows computer and had thousands of icons on my Dropbox. Finding the perfect icon took way too much time due to the way Windows Explorer works. After switching to a Mac I noticed that I struggled with the same problem. I found out that I wasn’t the only one struggling with finding icons because, a lot of designers have a messy and unorganised icon collection.

Iconjar gives people the ability to store all your icons in one place, just one click away by presenting all of the icons in an intuitive way. It’s a native macOS app that people can fill with your own icon collection and we’ll do the rest to make browsing easier.

iconjar-app

Iconjar Mac app

 

So as far as my awareness goes, there are only the two of you (Davey Heuser and Curtis Hard) behind the app. Could you tell a little bit about the backgrounds of the both of you? How did you two get to know each other?

Yes, it’s just the two of us (and Jord Riekwel made our beautiful honey-jar logo). I met Curtis through a Dribbble shot I posted when I wanted to take the project to the next level. It generated a lot of response and I chose Curtis to work with, because he seemed down to earth. We don’t just talk about Iconjar related things anymore, but we’ve grown to be friends with similar interests.

Curtis is a full-stack senior web developer by day and an Objective-C mastermind at night. Before working on Iconjar he built a popular RSS reader called Caffeinated. His favourite food is curry and he loves to go out with his camera to take pictures of airplanes or race cars. He recently got his hands on a BMX that he uses to drive around the English countrysides.

I, on the other hand, am an all-day product designer. My favourite foods are burgers, pasta and Nutella, but not at the same time. I too love to go out and take pictures that I post on my Instagram on almost a daily basis. I too discover new Dutch countrysides on a bicycle, but I have a road bike instead.

 

How did everything start? How did you come up with the idea of Iconjar?

Iconjar has been designed out of personal frustration, but after posting a Dribbble shot (yes it used to be a menubar utility because I thought that’d be a better user-experience) I noticed that there were more people that experienced this problem. Pascal Gartner motivated me to find a developer to turn this into a serious app. To validate the idea with potential users I made a landing page that collected over 1500 email addresses in just a few days. It was at about that moment Curtis reached out to me about working on the project. Jord Riekwel designed our pretty jar logo and we were good to go!

 

As I know Iconjar was set to be a side project. And we all know too well that sometimes it’s difficult to find time to work on side projects. How do you find time for it and how much time per week do you devote to the Iconjar related stuff?

Finding time to work on Iconjar is extremely difficult, but we are lucky enough to make the app for ourselves too. We are the target audience, so every bit of effort we put in will have a lot of impact on the way we work. I personally never thought that I’d ever use Iconjar so much myself, but I and thousands of others use it every day. I know this sounds cliche, but I don’t really keep track of how much time we put into Iconjar per week because, it has become natural to just work on it when we have new inspiration or the time for it.

iconjar-website-redesign

Iconjar website redesign

 

You’re coming extremely close to your v1.0 release. Any major plans for it?

That is true! We do have some interesting plans for exporting icons because we feel like there’s a gap there. We don’t want to share too much, though, so we’ll keep that a surprise!

 

That’s about it! Hope you enjoyed reading this interview as much as I enjoyed doing it. If you haven’t check IconJar out yet — it’s high time to do it!
Get Iconjar

Cheers!

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