Pond | Devpost

Inspiration

As designers, we started noticing a pattern in our own workflows — saving inspiration constantly but rarely doing anything with it. Overflowing Pinterest boards, forgotten Are.na collections, references that never made it into actual work. We surveyed 25+ designers and confirmed this wasn't unique to us — most rarely returned to saved content and struggled to describe their own taste unprompted. We had plenty of inspiration, but we were missing the discipline or friction to engage with it deeply.

What it does

Pond is a browser plugin that lets you save inspiration from anywhere — images, videos, sounds, text — and organizes them into custom pools. Every saved drop has a 30-day window. If you don't annotate it or Redew it — making something directly inspired by it — it evaporates. The goal is to move inspiration from passive accumulation into active creative knowledge.

How we built it

We validated the problem through a 25+ person survey, explored a wide range of concepts, then built the naming and metaphor system — drops, pools, evaporation, Redew — so the language reinforced the philosophy at every level. The prototype was built in Figma Make to demonstrate the decay mechanic and Redew interaction as dynamic experiences a static mockup couldn't capture.

Challenges we ran into

Though we ideated together on whiteboards and in Figma Design files, once we moved into the FigmaMake stage, prototyping was only able to be edited by one person at a time, which significantly hindered our process. Additionally, we took a very long time to decide on our ideas, which set us behind time-wise.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Though it took us a while, our idea is very strong and we thought about a lot of potential issues beforehand. We also created a clean and working prototype despite FigmaMake's relatively new nature.

What we learned

Constraints are a design tool. The features we added to slow Pond down felt risky but ended up being exactly what made the experience meaningful. We also learned how hard it is to design against familiar patterns — every instinct pulled us toward making Pond faster and more frictionless, and resisting that was a constant discipline.