BUILT IN FRAMER
2026 rights
Glif
A writing app that treats drafts as a stack of cards. Shipped from zero to twelve thousand users.
role
Founding designer
year
Client
Spool (YC W24)
tags
Mac, Editor
the brief
Spool (YC W24) came to me with a product that worked but didn't feel like anything in particular. We spent two weeks finding a metaphor money as a shape, drafts as a stack of cards, a research notebook that travels offline — and the rest of the engagement turning that metaphor into a coherent surface.
What I shipped
A redrawn information architecture that cut top-level destinations from eleven to four.
A type system tuned to the product's reading rhythm (long for body, short for labels).
A small component library, documented in plain English, used by three engineers daily.
Brand-adjacent surfaces — onboarding, empty states, error pages — written with the founder.
What I would improve
Start the metaphor work earlier, even when the team is impatient for screens. Every week we spent on naming things saved a month of arguing about pixels.