Connect-A-Sketch

2009–2014

A short history

Connect-A-Sketch left few public records beyond its own pages, so this timeline sticks to what those pages show. Dates come from Wayback Machine captures of connectasketch.com.

  1. 1 September 2009The privacy policy takes effect. The site's terms and privacy pages are captured on 10 September.
  2. September 2009The homepage goes up with three words, Upload, Connect and Click, and a note: "Connect-A-Sketch is currently in closed Beta. Open signup coming soon..." A ribbon in the footer credits Pointless Corp, alongside a Twitter account and a Get Satisfaction page for feedback.
  3. 12 September 2009The official tour, "An Introduction to Connect-A-Sketch", is captured: fifteen screens built in the app itself.
  4. May 2010A new build of the site goes out, and a public registration page appears. Signup is no longer closed.
  5. 2011The busiest year in the archive. Most of the shared prototype addresses the Wayback Machine knows about were first captured this year, many of them with feedback pages.
  6. 2012–2013Prototypes keep arriving, including wireframes for websites and business apps. Screen numbers in shared addresses pass 10,000.
  7. 2 April 2014The last capture of the working homepage. The footer now reads "© 2009-2014", and the beta badge is still there.
  8. October 2014The domain is serving an unrelated blog. The app, the shared links and the uploads server are gone.

Accounts and logins

The app had login, registration and password-reset pages, and early on the homepage itself carried a login box. None of that exists here. Accounts closed with the app in 2014, and there is nothing to sign in to. Old addresses for those pages lead to this one.

Why the idea was good

In 2009 most clickable prototypes were built in one of two ways. Designers either wrote rough HTML, which took a developer's time, or linked slides together in presentation software, which took patience. Connect-A-Sketch sat in the gap. It assumed the drawing was already done and focused on the step most people skipped: connecting the screens and putting them in front of another person.

The Upload, Connect, Click sequence is now inside nearly every design tool. What has been lost is the low ceremony of it, a tool that did one job and asked nothing else of its users. The 2026 workflow page is an attempt to keep that spirit with current tools.

About this site

This is an independent site about Connect-A-Sketch and the way of working it stood for. It is not run by the people who built the app. The archival passages are quoted from the app's own pages; the rest is new writing. The original privacy policy and terms are kept as historical documents and are clearly marked as no longer in force.