Verso

Inspiration

I've loved reading since I was four years old. My fondest memories are of my dad taking me to book sales, where I'd dig through boxes and pick books whose covers spoke to me. I'd bring home a huge bag of $2 books and decorate the margins with annotations — marking passages that made me laugh, cry, and think. As I got older, that changed. I moved to Kindle and Libby like everyone else, and lost the very parts of reading that had taught me so much about myself. The margin notes, post-its, dog-ears — replaced by a highlight button that felt nothing like pressing pen to paper. And even when I did highlight something, it just sat there, never synthesized into anything bigger. No platform helps you look across everything you've ever marked and understand what it reveals about you. That's what Verso is trying to fix.

What it does

Verso is a reading app built around synthesis over completion. Your annotations aren't just notes — they're evidence of what moves you and follows you from book to book without your conscious awareness. Verso makes that thinking visible across three screens: a Library that replicates the experience of wandering a physical shelf with annotation-driven recommendations, a Currently Reading screen with generous margins and no progress bar, and an Insights canvas where every annotation drifts in and clusters into themes over time. A ghost reflection prompt appears after a few annotations, asking quiet questions in the negative space of the canvas. Your answers stay permanently. The canvas grows denser the longer you use it.

How we built it

I started in Figma Design to map out screens and lock the design system. I used Crimson Text for passages, Courier Prime for annotations, a risograph-inspired palette of blue and magenta. Then I moved to Figma Make with Claude Sonnet to build the functional prototype. The annotation-to-canvas pipeline, staggered card animations, ghost prompt trigger, and timeline scrubber all required a live system that static design couldn't express.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest challenge was the Insights canvas. Early versions used node graphs and sticky note grids — both felt too much like existing tools and too dense for a contemplative experience. Landing on the spatial canvas, where proximity implies connection without labeling it, took several rounds of iteration. Getting the ghost prompt right was also difficult — every version that used a card or popup blended in with annotations. Removing the container entirely, just text floating on the canvas at 40% opacity, was the breakthrough.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a fully functional annotation pipeline in a single day as a solo participant - where text selected in Currently Reading becomes a living card on the Insights canvas - was really exciting because it's exactly what I've wanted in a reading app. The ghost prompt interaction is the moment I'm most proud of: a reflection question with no border, no background, just words in the space between your thoughts. It's unlike anything I've seen in an existing product.

What we learned

Friction is only valuable when it unlocks something. Every time I added a feature that slowed the user down, I had to ask whether the slowness was producing genuine value or just getting in the way. "Does this help the user think, or does it just make them work harder?" is a question that shaped almost every design decision in Verso. I also learned that the most original interactions often come from removing UI elements rather than adding them.

What's next for Verso The natural next step is real AI-powered theme detection - having the canvas actually cluster annotations by semantic meaning rather than hardcoded groupings. Beyond that, I'd love to explore what Verso looks like on a tablet app, where the reading experience lives for most people, and build out the social layer thoughtfully - not as a performance surface, but as a way to share a single annotation with someone who might need it. The bookmark feature, a shareable artifact of your reading fingerprint, is also something I'd want to revisit with more time.

Built With

• figma