Before social media, joy looked different: more tactile, more intentional. Patchwork brings that back.

Patchwork is a collaborative mobile scrapbook app built around Events: shared spaces tied to real moments, like a trip, a dinner out, or a random weekend with friends.

Team lead, and the team’s Figma teacher.

My teammates were new to Figma, so alongside leading the project I guided them through the tool as we built, from frames and auto layout to prototyping.

We started in Figma Make to explore layouts and UI patterns quickly, iterating on the canvas editor, home feed, and export flow before committing to a direction. We drew visual inspiration from early-2000s web aesthetics and warm autumn palettes, deliberately moving away from the clean minimalism that dominates modern apps.

From there we moved to classic Figma, building frames and auto layouts collaboratively, with one small suggestion constantly sparking a larger feature or a new direction.

How do you show something tactile in a static design tool?

The core Patchwork experience (dragging photos and stickers onto a canvas, repositioning and layering them) is fundamentally kinetic. Figma’s prototyping tools helped with transitions, but capturing the feel of placing a polaroid or plopping a sticker in exactly the right spot took creative workarounds we couldn’t fully resolve.

The best ideas came from the simplest question: “What did we do before social media?”

We saw firsthand how team momentum shapes a product: one small idea from one person became a defining element of the whole project. Building Patchwork reminded us why the concept resonated in the first place. We miss the version of sharing memories that was for us, not for an audience.