Paper Panels

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the everyday “in between” moments such as waiting for class to start, standing in line, riding the bus, or taking short mental breaks. These small pockets of time often lead to mindless scrolling.

Platforms like Webtoon offer amazing content, but many users express frustration with the UI feeling cluttered, unintuitive, and not optimized for quick, casual reading.

We wanted to redesign the webcomic experience to be calmer, simpler, and more intuitive, something that feels like flipping through paper, which we implemented via horizontal scrolling rather than vertical.

What it does

Paper Panels is a redesigned webcomic app focused on:

A cleaner more intuitive interface

Quick access for short reading sessions

Contains horizontal scrolling

Has a home , library, chapters, panels, panel view, shop, profile, settings, login

How we built it

We designed Paper Panels entirely in Figma focusing on:

Doing research on the UI gap of common comic apps

Designing UI components

Iterating on navigation structure

Ensuring most buttons simulate real functionality

We started with planning out the layouts and progressively refined the visual system, typography, spacing, and interaction design.

Challenges we ran into

Buttons initially being too small or hard to tap

UI elements not feeling consistent across pages

Overdesigning individual pages before establishing a consistent low-fidelity structure

Balancing aesthetic coziness without making it look too gamelike.

Through iteration we resized interactive elements, spacing and refined the overall visual hierarchy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Most buttons in the prototype are interactive and lead somewhere meaningful

We created a soft UI system inspired by cozy room decor

We redesigned a familiar concept in a way that directly addresses user complaints

What we learned

Build and solidify the low fi structure first before adding heavy visual detail

Functionality and user flow matter more than aesthetic polish at early stages

Consistency in spacing, sizing, and typography makes a huge difference in quality

Designing for short real life use cases requires simplicity over complexity

What's next for Paper Panels

Turning the Figma prototype into a fully functional application

Adding real backend logic to power all buttons and features

Implementing user accounts and saved reading history

Developing a recommendation system optimized for short reading sessions

Conducting usability testing to validate our UI improvements

Built With

• figma