Here’s the story of how a few little bears led their creators right to an Apple Design Award.
Bears Gratitude is a warm and welcoming title developed by the Australian husband-and-wife team of Isuru Wanasinghe and Nayomi Hettiarachchi.
Journaling apps just don’t get much cuter: Through prompts like “Today isn’t over yet,” “I’m literally a new me,” and “Compliment someone,” the Swift-built app and its simple hand-drawn mascots encourage people to get in the habit of celebrating accomplishments, fostering introspection, and building gratitude. “And gratitude doesn’t have to be about big moments like birthdays or anniversaries,” says Wanasinghe. “It can be as simple as having a hot cup of coffee in the morning.”
ADA FACT SHEET
Bears Gratitude
- Winner: Delight and Fun
- Available on: iOS, iPadOS, macOS
- Team size: 2
Download Bears Gratitude from the App Store
Wanasinghe is a longtime programmer who’s run an afterschool tutoring center in Sydney, Australia, for nearly a decade. But the true spark for Bears Gratitude and its predecessor, Bears Countdown, came from Hettiarachchi, a Sri Lankan-born illustrator who concentrated on her drawing hobby during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Wanasinghe is more direct. “The art is the heart of everything we do,” he says.
Bears Gratitude was developed by the Australian husband-and-wife team of Isuru Wanasinghe and Nayomi Hettiarachchi.
In fact, the art is the whole reason the app exists. As the pandemic months and drawings stacked up, Hettiarachchi and Wanasinghe found themselves increasingly attached to her cartoon creations, enough that they began to consider how to share them with the world. The usual social media routes beckoned, but given Wanasinghe’s background, the idea of an app offered a stronger pull.
“In many cases, you get an idea, put together a design, and then do the actual development,” he says. “In our case, it’s the other way around. The art drives everything.”
The art is the heart of everything we do.
Isuru Wanasinghe, Bears Gratitude cofounder
With hundreds of drawings at their disposal, the couple began thinking about the kinds of apps that could host them. Their first release was Bears Countdown, which employed the drawings to help people look ahead to birthdays, vacations, and other marquee moments. Countdown was never intended to be a mass-market app; the pair didn’t even check its launch stats on App Store Connect. “We’d have been excited to have 100 people enjoy what Nayomi had drawn,” says Wanasinghe. “That’s where our heads were at.”
But Countdown caught on with a few influencers and become enough of a success that the pair began thinking of next steps. “We thought, well, we’ve given people a way to look forward,” says Wanasinghe. “What about reflecting on the day you just had?’”
Hettiarachchi’s art samples get a close inspection from one of her trusted associates.
Gratitude keeps the cuddly cast from Countdown, but otherwise the app is an entirely different beast. It was also designed in what Wanasinghe says was a deliberately unusual manner. “Our design approach was almost bizarrely linear,” says Wanasinghe. “We purposel