Seasons | iOS app
Role
Product Designer
Art Direction
Timeline
Ongoing
Seasons is a native iOS journaling app built on a small daily ritual. Write a short entry, and that day becomes a single hand-stitched tile. Day by day the tiles join into a year you can scroll through, moving from spring to winter as you go. Because a year is never one mood, and neither is a life: a season for building a career, for finding love, for making things, for slowing down. Seasons sits with you through all of them. By the end you are not looking at a list of entries, but at the texture of your year, stitched together one day at a time.
Handmade and personal, built with AI as a quiet tool behind the scenes rather than a feature you talk to.
THE SPARK
Stitched by hand
When I was born, a relative made me a cross-stitch by hand. It has stayed with me ever since: slow, a little imperfect, made by someone who cared. I kept coming back to that object, and I wanted to build something that carried the same feeling. A small daily ritual you make one stitch at a time, and look back on at the end of the year.
THE QUESTION
Built with AI
Most apps feel the same now. Clean, flat, optimized, a little soulless, and more so as AI fills the world with generated design. That left me with a question: could something built with AI still feel handmade?
Seasons is my answer. There is no AI inside the app. I used it behind the scenes instead, to make the work feel more human, not less.
THE MAKING OF
The fonts I wanted came with licensing fees and rules, so I built my own instead. I made a small tool that turns a grid into cross-stitches, the same X you would sew by hand, then drew each letter one cross at a time, tuning the length and placement of every stitch until it sat right. The result is a typeface that is fully mine, properly stitched, and free of any licensing strings.
THE MAKING OF
Nothing in Seasons is flat colour. The whole world is woven cloth, and every illustration is stitched into it. I built controls to tune the weave, thread, and stitch size by feel, for both the linen background and each item, until it looked sewn rather than printed. Pull the stitch size down, and a coarse block resolves into a finely stitched cow.
Still stitching...
I care a lot about craft, maybe too much. But I'm a big believer in the 80/20 rule: get it most of the way there, then ship and figure out the rest in the open. So right now I'm rushing to get Seasons onto the App Store, finished or not. The core works, the illustrations are still landing one by one, and onboarding is doing its best to keep up. I'd rather have it out in the world, a little rough, than sit on a perfect version that never quite ships.