Greetings from Lisbon, a designer learning how to make her own tools.

Hello all, my name is Rachel and I am a product designer from Lisbon. For eight years now I would design products and give final mockups to developers, crossing fingers that the end result would be the same. This year, I made the decision to create my own little things, starting off with a color contrast tool that sits in my browser tab.

So far, I have been relying on Cursor and a whole lot of patience. Most evenings I make something work while breaking two other things.

I started my journey on Product Hunt to learn from other makers who have gone further than I have, and to find beta testers who can tell me straight out if I've made a mistake in my designs. Within the next three months, my objective is simple: create one product, document what I learned, and meet ten actual users.

If you're both a designer and coder, how did you allocate your time in the beginning? Also, what would be the best small project for a month?

9 views

Welcome Rachel. I came from the other side, code first, and the thing I would tell a designer who starts building with an agent: your advantage is not the mockups, it is the rules. Write them down once and make the agent read them before every change. Mine include: no raw hex color in a screen, every color is a named token that exists in both the light and the dark palette; every text style comes from one typography file; every tappable thing goes through one widget that gives the same press pulse and the same haptic. A designer knows what those rules should be on day one. Mine came over from a previous project, otherwise I would have written them far too late. On the month project: the contrast tool in a browser tab is a good one precisely because you are its first user and can tell when it is wrong. Keep that property. A tool you cannot judge yourself is the one that eats the month.

Greetings from Lisbon, a designer learning how to make her own tools.

Replies