I miss the Path app

---

Path was a privacy-focused "journal" style social app that only permitted a max of 150 friends/connections. I miss it pretty badly. I remember when Path 2.0 was launched and the chooser menu took the design world by storm. It was so popular, in fact, that there were several replica libraries that came out for web development, like this one for jQuery.

There were lots of little design details that made the Path experience fun, like this little clock that scrolled up and down the timeline with you, giving you a sense of place in the timeline:

Or this reaction panel (long before Slack reactions were a thing, and certainly before Nextdoor.com and everyone else started doing it):

I really think Path was ahead of it's time. I do not have a presence on most social media sites, and deeply prefer a lot of personal network to be done in a more privacy-focused envrionment. It would be great to have an app like that now. I think the network effect is what hurt Path - back in 2012-2013, most boomer and late gen-x age folks were only just getting the Facebook addiction claws hooked into them. It would have been easy to get one person to switch to Path, but requiring them to convince their families to join too was a bigger sell.

Regardless of the utility of the service itself, in the early 2010s when I was just starting out as a professional designer, Path was a really big influence on me. I vividly remember using it and feeling like designing UI for a living could not only be a sustainable gig, but also something that could be fun and invoke creativity and delight for the final consumer.

I miss that feeling.

I spent some time re-creating some of the UI in Figma just as a thought experiment in what it's like designing something that was designed entirely in Photoshop in Figma. It wasn't without it's challenges. I had to punt on a couple of textures/patterns/icons I couldn't quite re-create, but I hope I did the original design team justice.

Here's the end result. I hope people will find it useful or enjoy the trip down memory lane.

I miss you, Path!