Flat Packed Paintings

An IKEA bookshelf is not trying to be the best bookshelf ever made. It is trying to be the best bookshelf that fits in a flat cardboard box, fits in the back of a sedan, goes up a narrow apartment staircase, and can be assembled by one person with no tools and no experience.

Every one of those constraints shapes the final object. The particle board, the cam locks, the single Allen wrench. The instruction sheet is wordless so the same one works in every country without translation. And there are constraints the customer never even thinks about: the box has to be manufactured cheaply, stack in a shipping container, and survive a warehouse. None of that is your problem as the customer. But the price is your problem. IKEA doesn't tell you about their problems. They just solve them, and the receipt is your proof. The reason all of those invisible constraints matter is so a bookshelf can sit on the showroom floor at a price you will actually pay.

None of these are compromises. They are decisions about what the product needs to be for the person buying it. A hand-built oak bookshelf is a beautiful thing. It is also heavy, expensive, and might not fit up your stairs. You won't be passing an IKEA bookshelf down to your grandchildren, but it's cheap, light, and portable. Both can be good products. They are designed for different journeys. A product isn't just something you hold, it's something that has to fit through every door in its lifecycle.

This is how we think about paint-by-number design.

The design you see on screen is not the product. The product is the full journey: a photo turns into a set of numbered regions, those regions get printed on paper or canvas, someone sits down and paints them, and then the finished painting hangs on a wall. Every step in that chain constrains the one before it. The number of regions you have to paint, how small the regions are, the way numbers are placed, all of it has to work not just on screen but in someone's hands, with a brush, on a Friday evening, and then as a painting they are proud to look at. Everything matters.

More detail looks better. It always looks better. More regions means finer color transitions, and the finished painting is closer to the original photo.

What if you got the maximum detail? What if you literally painted your photo? A typical smartphone photo these days is made up of 12 million tiny dots, or pixels. You could spend the rest of your life painting each of those 12 million pixels. You're going to need a very tiny brush or a very large canvas!

So we could make an unpaintable picture perfect painting. What if we just made it really easy to paint? What if we just made it one region? Nice photo of your kids you got there, here's a solid block of beige. A toddler could quickly paint this and stay inside the lines, but it surely won't look like your photo.

So that is the entire trade-off we deal with every day: the better it looks at the end, the more work you'll have to do to earn it. Our job isn't to give you the maximum detail; our job is to find the exact sweet spot where the painting looks great and you actually finish it.

A custom paint-by-number is a lot like an IKEA product. It has to survive its whole journey. From a photo on your phone, through our algorithm, onto canvas, through your hands, and onto your wall. We're not designing a picture. We're designing that entire trip. And if we do our job right, you get to proudly look at your wall and say “I painted that” and mean it.