weathering – a notebook

Inspiration

I always journal bilingually, switching between Vietnamese and English, sometimes mid-sentence. My physical journals feel like they hold something my notes app never does. Not just the words, but the context: the way older pages fade, how ink bleeds faintly through to the next page, or just the fact that I can't flip to a new page without passing through old ones first.

Digital notes are efficient. They're so optimized for speed and volume that they've become disposable, and I write things down and never return to them. The app treats every note as equal, every moment as interchangeable. There's no trace of when something was written, no sense that time has passed, no reason to go back.

Weathering started from a simple question: what if a notes app remembered the way paper does?

What it does

Weathering is a digital notebook that accumulates traces of time and use same way a physical journal would.

• Time imprint: The older a note is, the darker and more textured its paper becomes, like pages that have sat in a notebook for months, absorbing the passage of time. A fresh note looks clean; an old one carries visible age.
• Visible edits: Deletions are never clean. Removed text fades and gets a soft strikethrough rather than disappearing, and your thinking process stays embedded in the page.
• Ghost/bleed: The previous note is faintly visible beneath your current page, like ink bleeding through thin paper. You're always writing on top of your own history.
• Peek of the past: When you open the app, you don't land on a blank page. You open the notebook cover, flip through a few recent past entries, and then arrive at a fresh page. The re-encounter with past notes is unforced and organic.
• Patina: Ink softens over time. The words you wrote six months ago feel gentler, less sharp — still legible, but worn in the way that well-read pages are.

The notebook uses a two-page spread layout with a center spine, grounding the experience in the physical form of a journal.

How I built it

I started with ideation and a full PRD defining the concept, interaction model, typography (Be Vietnam Pro for body text, designed for Vietnamese diacritics, and Averia Serif Libre for headers), a color system, and a patina progression timeline.

From there, I built a quick prototype in Figma Design to establish the visual language: layout, spacing, typography pairings, and the two-page spread structure. I also prepared texture assets (paper grain, aged paper, cover material). Both the Figma prototype and the assets were fed into Figma Make as reference, and I worked back and forth between Figma and Make throughout – using Figma to refine visual direction, then bringing those decisions into Make to build the interactive experience, then returning to Figma when something needed tighter control.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was scope discipline. The original concept included weather-based imprints, pen vs. pencil choice, and a growing notebook edge, but with the tight timeline, I had to cut to the mechanics that best answered the prompt and could actually be demonstrated in an interactive prototype. Weather imprints became time imprints; the growing edge was dropped entirely. Each cut was a decision to go deeper on fewer ideas rather than spread thin.

Working between Figma and Make was a constant negotiation. Make is powerful for generating interactive code quickly, but subtle visual effects, which creates the difference between "intentionally aged" and "rendering bug", required going back to Figma to nail the visual direction first, then translating that into Make. The back-and-forth was slower than I expected but produced better results than either tool alone.

What I learned

Designing "beyond efficiency" doesn't mean making things slow or inconvenient. It means being honest about what efficiency costs. Digital notes gained search, speed, and infinite space – but lost selectivity, spatial memory, the visible passage of time, and the accidental re-encounters that make a journal feel like yours. Weathering tries to keep the good efficiency and reintroduce what was quietly lost.

I also learned that writing a thorough PRD before prompting an AI tool saves enormous time. The clearer the spec, the less time spent iterating on outputs that miss the mark.

Built With

• figma
• figmamake