Design Journal

This project came from a long standing question I often return to in my sketchbooks and notes:

How do you document a design process?

Couple with the pain of creating case studies I decided:

• When it comes time to needing case studies, you've already forgotten what happened on the project.
• The best time to document what's happening is while its happening.
• Reflecting on a project while it's ongoing makes for better decision making and dovetails with my belief in Emergent Design.

Sketchbook -> Code

I skipped Figma entirely for this project and took my notebook sketches and translated them right into Bolt.

This was an exercise in relinquishing control, using the output of the AI and shepherding it towards an outcome. Sometimes the AI would create something great which sparked an idea. Sometimes it was head bangingly frustrating.

The 1st version was just a timeline of thoughts and images:

But I soon added in an AI suggestion for next steps:

and a "generate case study" option:

Some of the most interesting work was swapping between the models from OpenAI, DeepSeek and Anthropic and understanding which were best suited to each task.

I found some beta testers on Linkedin and got some good initial feedback

I realised the core habit loop of "reflect on the day" is difficult to build and it requires something more engaging than a web app. Email reminders or a companion app are two ideas.