Project № 01
WeeeTinker
A precision workbench for visual thinking — designed, architected, and shipped end-to-end.
This case study is gated. Enter the access key to view WeeeTinker in full. Access persists for the rest of this session.
A precision workbench for visual thinking — designed, architected, and shipped end-to-end.
WeeeTinker is a desktop-first visual-thinking canvas for mapping flows, brainstorming and organising ideas — shipped as a Tauri app on Windows and Mac, and as a web app for anyone with a browser. I designed, architected, and led every surface of the product, from the creative North Star down to the exact radius of a connector handle.
The product is not a playful whiteboard clone. It is an instrument — infinite canvas, smart nodes, intelligent auto-layouts, rich notes, AI-assisted templates and a native gallery — designed for long sessions without visual fatigue. One purchase, lifetime updates, no subscription.
Whiteboard tools are fast and playful but collapse under the weight of a serious system. Diagramming tools have the rigour but feel like filing cabinets — you can feel the drag on every decision. Neither respects the way a designer, engineer or strategist actually thinks over a four-hour block.
I wanted a tool that could do both: the immediacy of a napkin and the structure of a blueprint, with zero friction between the two.
The brief I set for myself was narrow and severe: desktop-first, offline-first, file-based, keyboard-fluent. Every interaction had to survive a long session. Every panel had to earn its pixels. The canvas is the open bench. Panels are instruments. Floating surfaces are tools brought closer to the hand.
The accent is a signal, not decoration. The work had to feel focused rather than flashy, dense but never cramped, premium through restraint, not ornament.
Wrote Design.md as the canonical creative and system source of truth — typography, colour, motion, panel anatomy, accent language, and governance rules. A prescriptive document so the product never drifts into one-off UI decisions.
Set up the monorepo: apps/web (React 18 + Vite 6 + Tailwind 4 + D3/Dagre), apps/desktop (Tauri shell), and shared packages/ui + packages/automation. Defined the .weeet file format as the canonical document envelope with round-trip compatibility.
Designed and shipped the canvas, node system, connectors, rotation handles, rich notes, per-corner radii, image opacity and tint, sticky notes, shape library, gallery mode, and seven intelligent auto-layouts — in parallel, as a single designer-engineer.
Wrote the feature inventory, manual test checklist, and hardening audit. Shipped v1.0 for Windows, with Mac and Web in close succession. 194+ commits across seven working sessions kept the canvas stable while the surface kept growing.
WeeeTinker should feel like a precision workbench for thought — focused rather than flashy, dense but never cramped, premium through restraint, not ornament. — Design.md · Creative North Star
Six representative slots — canvas, node editor, connector system, auto-layouts, gallery mode, and the Tauri shell — that will host the real screenshots once the case study is unlocked.
Single-founder product — design, architecture, implementation, release engineering, and marketing site — all by one hand.
WeeeTinker is the clearest expression I have of design leadership as architecture. Every decision compounds: a panel convention becomes a design token, a design token becomes a shared primitive, a shared primitive becomes a governance rule in Design.md. When one person owns the North Star, the code and the release, the product can move as fast as a single decision.
The most valuable lesson was about restraint. Every time I was tempted to add a feature, I asked whether the canvas could already solve it through composition. The answer was usually yes — and the product kept its density without ever feeling cramped. The full case study, with the real screens and the real numbers, will land here soon.