notes, written slowly
Things I learned while building — design handoff, animation patterns, and what shipping for real people in Nepal teaches you.
The gap between a polished Figma file and the shipped product is where most designs die. Here's the handoff process I use on my own projects — where the designer and the developer are the same person, and the design still tries to escape.
After animating a dozen products I use the same four patterns everywhere: the staggered entrance, the scroll reveal, the layout-aware expand, and the spring that follows the cursor.
Five messaging platforms, five webhook formats, five ideas of what a 'message' even is. What I learned normalising all of them into one inbox people actually triage.
Dark mode isn't inverted light mode. The token structure that made this site's toggle painless: semantic names, values swapped per theme, and components that never know which theme they're in.
Shreejana Dry Fruits taught me more about product design than any SaaS project — because the users were a family with a notebook, and the notebook was better than most admin dashboards.