An App for Modern Collage

Last month, I wrote about starting a business. In that post, I mentioned the first product I was building was an iOS app for collage.

That app is called Pezzos. It’s a fun way to make, share, and explore digital collages. It’ll be available sooner than later.

When Can I Use It?

I’m racing to get the app ready for first users as soon as possible. As long as nothing goes too sideways and I can keep myself on task, I’ll start inviting people to a limited pre-release build at the end of this week into next. The limited test run will be short. Just long enough to catch major oversights and bugs. Reach out if you’re interested in joining it.

What Else?

I have a ton of thoughts on this process, the current state of software development, and all of…[gestures wildly]…this. But, I’m too focused on the work at hand to write anything worth reading right now. Instead, here are a few scattered thoughts at the front of my mind:

• This is an app I wanted, but it didn’t exist the way I thought it should, so I’m building it
• Collage is a wonderful, accessible art form. I’ve always enjoyed it, but through this I’m getting exposed to so much more of the collage world and I love it more every day
• This is something I feel good about putting into the world
• Pezzos is slow-on-purpose. I’m building in small bits of friction to make it an alternative to the all-too-easy-to-reach-for doom-scrolling
• Pezzos has no “AI” (however, I do make use of LLMs to help build it)
• The business model is old-fashioned. I’m building a product and charging customers money for that product. Then I’m going to leave those customers the fuck alone
• It’s important and good to make art. That’s always the case, but it’s especially important in bad times. In the US right now, we’re in bad times

I’ll have plenty more to say and many favors to ask of a lot of people soon. Until then, this:

Authoritarian governments view culture as a threat because in the writing and music and acting of artists, you can sometimes glimpse alternatives to the current reality. We live in a timeline that says AI domination is inevitable, there will be no future except constant war on a dead Earth, and the people with the most money will get to decide who and what survives. The arts remind us that none of the current truisms are absolutes—that there are other ways of living, existing, and being. Arts can exist outside of a tech lord’s algorithm. — Abigail McGrath's Legacy of Art-Making Reminds Us That Another Way Is Possible

If you have thoughts about this post, email me@tylergaw.com or ping me on Bluesky.