4Chan Creator Chris Poole Launches His Creativity App DrawQuest For The iPhone

Chris Poole, creator of the infamous message board site 4chan, doesn't want anyone to suffer from blank-sheet-of-paper syndrome ever again.

It's hard for people to start something creative from scratch, Poole found through his experience with a prior startup, Canvas, because they're intimidated and don't think their ideas are good enough.

Enter DrawQuest: an app he launched for iPad back in February that encourages users to get creative by giving them a daily prompt and a template. These prompts and corresponding templates are called "Quests." For example, the app could provide a picture of a stick-figure knight while asking users "What is the knight fighting?" Fill in the scene to complete the Quest.

Today, Poole is releasing the iPhone version of the app, redesigned and packed with new features.

"We wanted to one-up ourselves and so we started from scratch," he told Business Insider.

Here's a taste of what the DrawQuest team added to the app:

• You can now create your own Quests to share with other artists
• Try out the new zoom feature to add more details to your drawings
• If you need to fill the background with one color, use the new paint can feature

Since the tablet app launched, its over 100,000 active users have created more than 5 million drawings. Poole hopes that he'll be able to reach even more potential artists now that he's introduced iPhone use.

"DrawQuest feels like a game on the surface and we use the daily challenge part of the app to draw people in," Poole says (pun not intended). But, like 4chan did, the app has started to morph into a more all-encompassing community. "We have seen people really embrace DrawQuest as part of their identity and as their creative home on the web. And that's something that we've really tried to foster."

Download the new version of DrawQuest for your iPhone here.