Petal 🌸

Inspiration

Digital moodboard tools like Milanote, Are.na and FigJam are wildly popular tools. This is because designers think in visual canvases to form narratives, drawing inspiration from multiple sources and mediums. But the free tier always runs out, and self-hosting is never an option.

Petal was inspired by a simple image: petals falling and collecting naturally in one place. We wanted to build that - a moodboard tool that is free, open, and has no limits.

What We Built

An infinite visual canvas for designers. Drop images, videos, links, text notes, and color swatches. Arrange freely. Share with one link.

Core features:

• Multi-user web app with social login and persistent database
• Infinite canvas with fluid drag, zoom, and snap
• Create, save and delete moodboards
• Convert text notes to images via image generation plugin
• Shareable read-only links to invite guests
• Open source quantized LLM running on web-gpu in the browser for automatic reorganization by texture, color, mood, content or user voice narrative

How We Built It

Built frontend and backend entirely on MeDo through natural language conversation. Provided code example to integrate quantized LLM running on web gpu.

Challenges

Canvas feel is harder than it looks. Zoom inertia, pointer capture, and z-index during drag all needed careful iteration. Clipboard image handling also varies across Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, each required its own fallback.

What We Learned

Be specific and precise with MeDo early. Vague prompts produce generic scaffolding. Describing exact interactions and data shape produce code you can ship.

What's Next

• Real-time collaboration
• "Fill from prompt" - describe a mood, AI searches web and populates starter images

Petal is fully open source. Self-host it, fork it, make it yours.

Built With

• medo
• transformers.js