I Built a Drawing App That Can't Draw for You

On August 17 I uploaded build 32 of an app to App Store Connect and submitted it for review with exactly one tester: my friend Matt. The app icon was a placeholder — a black ink wave on warm cream, a stand-in I threw together because I hadn't drawn a real one yet. There was something honest about that. The whole app is about drawing by hand, and I'd handed it to its first tester wearing an icon I hadn't drawn.

The app is called Strangely Drawn. This is the first time I've written about it.

It has one rule, and the rule is a refusal

You submit a selfie to a public pool. A stranger — anonymous, no profile, someone you will never meet — picks it, gets a blank canvas and real brushes, and redraws you by hand. When they finish, the drawing comes back to you, and it goes into a public gallery. That is the loop. Draw a stranger; see how you were drawn.

The rule is that there is no generative AI anywhere in that loop. Not a feature I forgot to add — the product. Any phone can now generate a convincing portrait of a face on demand, so an image of your face is no longer the scarce thing. The scarce thing is knowing a real person sat with it and made something. The delight I'm chasing is small and specific: a real person drew this, by hand, for you.

The timelapse is the proof

Every drawing is captured stroke by stroke as it happens — an ordered stream of points, each one carrying position, pressure, tilt, and a timestamp, stored separately from the finished picture. That stream is what lets the app replay a drawing as a timelapse, and it is also the receipt. A generated image has no strokes to replay. If you can watch it being drawn, a hand drew it — the proof isn't a badge or a line in the terms of service, it's the recording itself.

I wrote the drawing engine from scratch in Metal instead of using Apple's PencilKit. PencilKit's ink types are a closed list — marker, pen, pencil, a few more — and you cannot add your own, a dead end the moment you want a real brush kit. The cost is that "feels good" can only be judged on a physical 120 Hz iPad; pressure and tilt don't exist in the Simulator. I tuned the brush on an iPad Air with an Apple Pencil Pro until it stopped feeling like a toy.

The look had to have a hand in it

An app about drawing by hand shouldn't feel like it was assembled from a component library. So the whole thing wears a look I call Riso Zine: a risograph aesthetic on two fluorescent inks — a hot pink and a hard blue — on paper that inverts in dark mode. Anton and Space Mono for type. Every panel is zero-radius, a hard three-pixel keyline, no blur, no shadow. The wordmark is deliberately misregistered — three offset copies in pink, blue, and ink, the way a two-color zine comes out when the paper shifts between passes. It is loud and printed and a little wrong on purpose. A drawing made by a person is a little wrong on purpose too — the chrome should agree with the content.

Where the name came from

There was an app called French Girls in 2014 — the name a Titanic joke — where the crude drawings strangers made were the whole charm. It let the drawings be the hero. It died. I'm rebuilding it in spirit, which meant I couldn't reuse the name — it carries trademark risk and drags in exactly the wrong search results. I went through a small graveyard of alternatives before landing on Strangely Drawn. It keeps the one word that matters, drawn, and means two things at once: drawn by a stranger, and strange in the way the results come out. It names the experience instead of describing the app.

What it actually is right now

It is not on the App Store. It is one tester, that placeholder icon, and a short list of unglamorous last things. The drawing, the brushes, the selfie reference, the timelapse, the gallery, and the stranger-to-stranger delivery all work. The moderation gate that keeps the public pool clean is built and running, and the build now points at the real production database instead of the wall of colored test squares it first launched against. What's left is a real icon to replace the stand-in, the moderation service promoted to production, and the device check that keeps bots out flipped on for real people.

It's the one thing I've built that a model isn't allowed to make for you. A machine can draw a thousand faces a second; what it can't do is be the person who bothered to draw yours.