The playful grug delivers daily wisdom in Neolithic grunts, and looks good doing it. Reading daily grug affirmations like “only walking grug find breakthrough ... sitting grug find nothing” is a primal joy. But it’s the scribbled design that really pops; it’s a little masterpiece of clever simplicity that never takes itself too seriously. (Check out the app’s hand-drawn status bar and its release notes.) Appropriately for an app from the Stone Age, there’s no login, no cloud syncing, nothing extraneous — just a simple idea that smart developer do good.

We caught up with Jip van der Velde and Michel Elings of the Netherlands-based Ocho studio — both of whom gave multisyllabic answers — about how they created their own “little world.”

grug

• Team name: Ocho
• Available on: iPhone
• Team size: 2
• Based in: Netherlands
• Category: Delight and Fun

Download grug from the App Store >

How did you two meet?

van der Velde: We started working together in 2012, so by the time we launched Ocho in April 2025, there was a lot of trust and shared taste between us. A silly message can become a prototype; a joke can become a design direction. Because we know each other so well, we can move quickly, challenge each other honestly, and keep the work playful. The app came directly from that friendship and synergy — two close friends building something with care, speed, and surprise.

grug has such a distinct look. Walk us through your earliest design concepts.

van der Velde: Once we found grug’s voice, we quickly started exploring the handwritten style. The first versions used existing handwritten fonts, but they looked too clean and polished. Almost as a joke, we asked: What if we draw the whole thing ourselves?

In this case, the joke became the technical foundation. We built a font-drawing canvas directly inside grug, then built a rendering engine that could use those drawings as a custom type system. Above the drawing canvas, we had a live lesson preview, so every time we drew a new letter, we could immediately see how it changed a real grug wisdom line. That was the first moment the app started to feel alive.

The final product is still very close to that early idea. We polished the experience through testing, but the core remained the same. The imperfection is intentional. The roughness sets the stage for grug’s character and for the idea behind the app: make the useful thing feel small enough to start.

What was the hardest design decision you had to make?

Elings: Probably whether to make the whole app use our custom hand-drawn font engine, or only use it for the daily wisdom text. Using it everywhere was much harder — it meant we had to build rendering, layout, animation, sizing, icons, and interaction states around our own stroke data. But that decision became the thing that makes grug feel like grug. If we had compromised on the handwritten engine early, grug would probably feel like a quote app with a cute font. Instead, it feels like its own little world.

When did you feel like things really clicked?

van der Velde: The first time we saw a grug lesson being written on screen with our own hand-drawn letters. It was just a screen recording, but it felt magical, not like a font fading in but like ink appearing on paper. It suddenly felt like grug was on the other side of the screen writing the lesson for you.

What surprised you most about how people actually used grug?

Elings: How quickly people started speaking back to us in grug’s voice. That showed us the character wasn’t just decoration. But our most meaningful feedback has been people telling us that grug makes the morning feel a little lighter. The app is small, but that daily emotional effect is exactly what we hoped for.

What advice would you give to a developer or designer just starting out?

Elings: Ship. When you build, you find new ideas, bad ideas, technical roadblocks, better directions, and real people. Put something into the world, learn from what happens, then keep going.

Build with the platform, not against it. Apple gives developers powerful frameworks and a huge audience, but the best results come when you understand what the platform is good at and then add your own point of view.

Also, protect the fun. If you enjoy the process, you notice more details, you take bigger creative swings, and people feel that care in the final product.

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