Made With Creative Market: The LIGHTWEIGHT Weightlifting App

Sure! My name is Patrick Delaney, and I’m a front end web developer and designer with 3 years of professional experience. I make cool stuff happen on the web for everyone from family-owned hair salons to billion-dollar national restaurant chains. I specialize in mobile-first and responsive design, which is a fancy way of saying I can take a cramped space and make it look good. I recently packed my bags and left the US for a job in Sydney, Australia at Creative Licence Digital, where I’ve been working with some amazingly talented people in the mobile and web-app world. At heart, I’m an artist who uses technology to make my artistic designs a tangible, marketable reality. A lot of designers try to minimize or downplay the commercial aspect of their work, but I honestly have a lot of fun tackling problems that address my clients’ bottom lines. It’s a great motivator to cut to the core of a design, and it’s probably the only thing that really informs my style at this point. Now that we all know who you are and what you do, tell us about LIGHTWEIGHT and how you came up with the idea for this app. My motivation for LIGHTWEIGHT is pretty selfish. I want this app to be a real thing! One of my hobbies is powerlifting, and I wanted a simple app that would help me record my progress in the gym. I was getting increasingly frustrated with how dissonant and out-of-touch most fitness apps on the market are. They make it really hard to record your progress, create your own workouts and, most of all, are really unintuitive to use when you’re out of breath and shaking from a really hard set. I don’t want to watch a video of the exercise I just did, I want to record my progress! Stop throwing crap that I don’t need in my way! So I started formulating the app in my head, but I never sat down and banged the thing out because I’m a lazy bum. When I saw Creative Market’s Fight Procrastination Contest, I knew the time had come to sit down and build a simple proof-of-concept that would put my idea to the test. Haha! Yay, so glad we could help motivate you! Can you take us through your design process for the project? Basically, I listed each step of my typical workout, figured out how the app would address each step, then started mercilessly removing anything from the user experience that wasn’t absolutely 100% helpful. After several drafts, I boiled the app down to three essential actions: 1 – find your current workout (without having to hunt through a stupid giant spreadsheet) 2 – refer back to your last workout (without having to hunt through a stupid giant spreadsheet) 3 – log your progress and rate the workout’s difficulty (without having to… well, you know) And that’s it! I added a progress bar because I’m lazy and don’t like doing clock math in my head when I’m trying to improve my poverty bench. Everything else; the workout planner, the progress summaries, the minor settings options––were all relegated to the sidebar to be accessed once every couple of months. I kept the design simple with a three-color scheme and a (mostly) flat, minimal design. Every element of the app was informed by a desire for minimalism and simplicity. Love it, quick and to the point! So, overall, how does Creative Market typically fit into your creative work? Creative Market has been a fantastic design resource for me because everything is designed by designers, for designers. It’s low-drag, easy to implement, and works with my design instead of competing with it. I typically use Creative Market assets like fonts, photos, and mockups as supplements to my main project. Knowing that I can get the creative building blocks that I need to get my design out the door on time is a huge boon for me. That’s so great to hear! Did you use Creative Market assets in a similar way for this project? I used a combination of fonts (everyone go buy Manifold CF right now, it’s fantastic), photos, and templating tools to put together a lean, effective presentation in record time (three days from idea to shipped).

Show Us What You’ve Made

Patrick’s latest #MadeWithCreativeMarket project is nothing short of incredible, and we know you’ve got great examples of #MadeWithCreativeMarket projects too. So, if you’ve created something awesome with Creative Market assets, head over to Made With Creative Market and submit your work by clicking the “Share What You’ve Made” button the left hand side. If you’d like us to feature your Made With Creative Market work in a blog post, just leave us a note with your submission, and we’ll contact you if we think it’s a good fit.