You won’t.

I've been making books since the beginning of our relationship. One for our first anniversary, and one every year since. Our memories live in books that are in our living room.

Everyone who comes to our house looks at them. And they all ask the same thing. How can I make a book like this?

For years I've given the same answer. You won't.

Year after year, I always ordered the small hardcovers, because I was scared of the prices. You start a book and it says $19.99. Then you add the pages you actually need, and the cover you actually want, and by the time you're done it has multiplied into a number you weren't ready for. So i would go back and take things out. That's the part that still bothers me. I made my own memories smaller to stay under a number.

Everyone loved them anyway. But that's only because I spent so much time forcing an app to do things it didn't actually have the functions to do.

Then one night we had friends over, and the same subject came up as always. "Omg I love your books — how do I do one?!"

Same answer. You won't.

Not because they couldn't. Because I knew what it actually took. The sorting and arranging. Layouts that go messy the moment you change anything. The alternative being a book of square full-bleed photos, which just doesn't work for a lot of images. Comments under photos that always felt like a cheap yearbook instead of an expensive book. Cover options that were basic.

And the worst one. Once you started adding photos, you had to finish. Put it down for the night and coming back later meant scrolling through hundreds of pictures to find where you left off. So it was never a thing you picked at for an hour. It was a weekend.

After everyone left we started watching a movie, and I couldn't get it out of my mind. So I started typing. Everything I liked, disliked and loathed about how the book apps I'd tried worked. My fingers were flying all night long.

The quest was simple, and not simple at all: How could an app make it so anyone could make a photo book that looked like a designer had helped create it?

A few weeks earlier, my MacBook had died. I took it to Apple and found out it was too old to repair. Unfortunately, I had just cancelled my AppleCare a couple of months earlier. That's when I also found out that I had cancelled the wrong AppleCare, so by some miracle it was still covered. They ended up sending me a brand new one, free. It was still sitting in the box, unopened.

I was off work the next day. So I took it out of the box.

I'd never made an app before. I barely knew where to begin. But I had an idea, a new laptop, a day off from work, and I'm pretty good on a computer. So… how hard could it be?

Friday the computer came. Saturday night the friends came over. Monday night I had an app running on my phone.

And it worked! Kinda…

But those results had me optimistic. I thought that I'd have this built in a matter of weeks. That wasn't optimistic - it was delusional. But as the weeks rolled by it slowly stopped being a hobby project, and started becoming a passion project — maybe an obsession at times.

I have always tried to keep my photos organized, in fact, I think I may have every digital photo I've ever taken in my cloud right now. I was always backing up and keeping a drive of pictures from every trip. I got it from my mother. She was passionate about keeping memories alive. She was a portrait photographer when we were kids, and she made family albums every year — until we got into high school and life became too busy.

So year after year, the photos were printed, then set aside to put them in albums later. She thought family photos and their stories were so important that finding a starting place was paralyzing to her. So we are left with years of family photos sitting in boxes that never got put away properly.

The modern equivalent is an overflowing camera roll, offloading images to websites to save for later. A later that nobody ever gets to.

You'd love to. You won't.

As I was working I kept thinking about how much she would have loved this, and I started designing with her in mind. She used her MacBook, loved her iPad. But the apps I'd been using? Those would have worn her down by the third page. If she did get it to work, I'm confident the results would not have been up to her standards.

She wasn't disorganized. She cared too much. It had to be right before it could start, so it never started.

And that became the thing I actually set out to fix. Not the layouts. Not the covers. The part where it matters so much that you freeze.

So that became the rule. Making a book should feel like play, not work. You shouldn't have to decide which of the two hundred pictures of the same birthday party is the best one. Put them all in. We'll take care of it.

I wrote that rule down. And every time I got lost in something complicated, I went back and read it again.

It turns out that making something feel easy is the hardest thing I have ever done.

Everyone kept pushing me to finish. The app worked. It just wasn't up to my standards. So I started telling myself, over and over: don't let perfection stand in the way of completion. But I refused to move forward if the app wasn't something I would be excited to use myself.

A few months in I got to a spot in the app that got more complicated than I was ready for. I couldn't get it to work. Fix and test, then fix and try again. Rinse and repeat. The following Saturday night about 11pm it still wasn't right. I had patched too many things, thrown on too many bandaids — it was just not working. So I finally did what I knew I had to do, and deleted the entire week's work and went back to the previous version of the app.

It was a punch in the gut. And it was the first time I felt like maybe I was in over my head. I took a long hot shower to relax, meditate, and try to keep the tears in my eyes.

The next day I reminded myself that I was living a creative process. And sometimes creative goes two steps forward and three steps back. After a few days, I thought of a different way to tackle the problem, and it worked. There were several more of those times to come. But the pills became easier to swallow.

Finally it stopped being something I was building and started being something I used. I made our next book in it. It took an evening.

Friends still come over. They still look at the books. They still ask how.

The answer is different now.

What I want is for someone to open that box and be surprised at themselves. Not that they did it alone — everyone who was there helped, that's the whole point — but that they made something that beautiful without a designer.

Nobody should need years of practice to keep the things that happened to them.

You'd love to.

Now you can.

— Rocky