It all started with a simple task. It was 2021, and I was trying to round corners on an image. It sounds easy enough, but after using design tools like Photoshop on-and-off for nearly 20 years, I knew it wouldn’t be. A YouTube video, 15 steps, and a good deal of frustration later, I came back to a thought I’ve had for my entire career working in creative tools: there has to be a better way. And in that moment, I finally realized it was time to do something about it.
It might have been an “aha moment,” but it was a decade in the making for both me and my co-founder, Piers Cowburn. We’d worked together for 12 years at both Snap and Amazon – me leading product teams building tools and platforms for content creators and Piers as an expert in creative engineering. And in November 2021, we teamed up again to build the tool we always wished we had: an in-browser, AI-native, collaborative image editor.
Since then, we’ve come a long way. We’ve assembled an incredible team, spoken with countless designers, marketers, and creatives, and built a product that we couldn’t wait to get into people’s hands.
And today, I’m excited to share that Modyfi is now available in Beta 🚀🙌
But let’s back up. Why do graphic design tools need an upgrade?
The problem: There’s too much friction in the creative process
In the past few years, there have been breakthrough advancements in technology to empower creatives. It’s been exciting to see, but one thing is still missing: they haven’t been enabled in the tools designers use on a daily basis, leaving the biggest areas of friction in the creative process untouched. Designers today are still using heavy duty desktop software to create images. That software doesn’t allow for collaboration, so they still have to aggregate feedback from their clients or coworkers in separate Google Docs. After making their edits, they’re still clunkily naming their new version “Final Final V2” to keep track of versioning. There still isn’t a singular home for where those documents, not to mention designers’ large library of assets, are stored. And they’re probably visiting yet another site to search for stock images.
We believe this is far from an ideal creative process. And that’s where Modyfi comes in: to remove mundane tasks and obstacles to collaboration so designers are free to be more productive and more creative.
What we’re building: A next-generation, AI-native creative platform
Over the past year, we’ve been hard at work to bring Modyfi to creatives everywhere, because we believe that modern technology can empower an entirely new way of working. Recent advances in AI and image generative models like Google Imagen, Open AI Dalle2, and Stable Diffusion have captured a lot of buzz, and they’re just waiting to be put in the hands of creatives within the tools they use today. Modyfi fits right into this puzzle to combine everyday graphic design software with the newest AI technology for real world use.
Modyfi will inspire today’s creatives by removing mundane tasks, making teamwork easy, enabling greater creativity in the design process, and making image creation faster than ever. We’ve built a lightning-fast tool, directly in your browser. We’ve centralized the graphic design process by putting projects and assets in one place. And we’re helping designers take advantage of today’s latest technologies by combining AI with fine-tuned controls: image diffusion, background removal, depth mapping, in- and out-painting, upscaling, powerful shaders, and much much more.
What’s next: Sharing Modyfi with you
Now, we’re ready for you to try Modyfi for yourself. You can sign up for the waitlist via the link below, we’ll be admitting people on a rolling basis.
We can’t wait to see what you create, and to hear your feedback. We’re also looking for graphic designers and their teams to partner with us, use the app and provide feedback to help us develop the product.
If you’re interested in talking to us, reach out to us at contact@modyfi.io
To stay tuned and sign up for our waitlist, visit modyfi.com