Then your growth comes down to keeping people engaged with new / fun ways to make art easily.
What I like best is that it allows someone with zero artistic ability (like me) to make a piece of artwork that they'd be proud of. That's quite a trick.
What are some things you've thought about building on top of it? What have your users been asking for?
Some of the things I've thought about:
- Expanding the expressive range. The new app has a "silk eraser" and I have ideas for at least one new type of brush.
- Continuous undo (as if it's a movie), or at least more undo levels.
- Making a better Alchemy: http://al.chemy.org/
- Unifying the experience of the website (2013; JS/Canvas) and the new app (Swift/Metal)
- The website lets you share replays of your drawings that play back on the site. What's the best way to do something similar with the app?
- A gallery would be great but requires figuring out the previous two points to some extent. There's a lot of potential but it feels like a lot to navigate through.
Long-term I'd love Silk to be a Bret Victor-inspired environment for visually exploring computation: Compute with color and time, explore the system, make your own brushes. You can think of a brush as a function from input history to pixels on the canvas. I think there's a lot of potential here.
Some of the common things people ask for:
- More colors. The new app has more palettes, which is a start.
- More undo levels.
- High-resolution export. This will be coming to the app, potentially inside a bundle of "pro" features.
- Plugins for Photoshop and other professional design tools.
- Prints. I've experimented with prints before but found that the art doesn't come out nearly as well in print. My bar for quality here is this piece made by a talented designer friend (Anand Sharma) many years ago: http://bit.ly/1TDS2sz. Maybe the right answer here is something more ephemeral like greeting cards.
I like the idea of a gallery - that will help you grow as people show off their work. You don't necessarily need live replays to do it - you could start with static and add those later.
One thing to think about is how you can make it grow more. Your users won't generally bring you growth ideas, but it's important to always be thinking about how to get more users.
Also +1 for the gallery idea, and not worrying about animations, just a gallery with voting and show off the ones that get the most votes.
Like: http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes
Another idea from that: take the palettes from colourlovers and add those as something people can choose from to do the drawings with.
EDIT: Also, add a mailing list. I'd like to be notified when you get around to doing high-res or prints. Right now, I can't even find contact information to get in touch with you to make this request.
http://weavesilk.com is a side project of mine for many years. I put out a brand new version of the iOS app this month and am thinking about developing it further but find it very hard to decide what direction to go.
The website is popular, and people love Silk, but for different reasons: some find it relaxing and meditative, others like that it closes the gap between their artistic ability and taste.
It's been used as an inspirational sketching tool for artists (http://bit.ly/1Qlm1kA), to make album art, and has been on exhibit at the Children's Creativity Museum. Some teachers use it to teach kids about symmetry.
I've made something compelling but don't know what to do next, or how to figure it out.