Solo design and build, 2026
Siloët
A reading instrument for the emotional signal inside writing.
- Role
- Sole designer and builder
- Timeline
- 48-hour design exercise
- Team
- Solo
- Tools
- Figma, Claude Code, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Siloët gave me 48 hours to design how its product makes the emotional and social meaning of a piece of writing visible: a complete, connected flow in light and dark, not a single polished screen. I answered with working software.
What it came to
- Writers who tested the live prototype
11
Writers who tested the live prototype
- Understood the reading without being walked through it
9
Understood the reading without being walked through it
- Accounts, servers or data leaving your device
0
Accounts, servers or data leaving your device
Scope
- Product design
- Interaction
- Front-end
Siloët reads a piece of writing at the pace you set and opens the moments where the reading changed as points in a field beneath the words. Nothing is scored.
Every product in this space turns a person’s writing into a verdict: a score, a trait, a percentage. That framing is both wrong and unpleasant. The problem was to build something that interprets without judging, and still feels precise enough to trust.
Who it is for
01
Writers checking how a piece lands
People drafting something personal who want to see what a reader will feel, not just what the words say.
02
Anyone about to send something that matters
The apology, the hard update, the reply you have rewritten four times. The first sample is exactly that message.
03
Readers trying to understand what they were sent
The second sample is a note you received. Siloët reads it with you, and shows the phrases behind every reading so you can judge it yourself.
The decisions that shaped it.
Confidence is drawn as light, never printed as a number
A percentage reads as a score, and a score reads as a judgement about the writer. Certainty is carried by a point’s size and halo instead, so the interface can be exact without being reductive.
A thread is drawn only when a real relation exists
Two signals connect only when the analysis found one of three named relations between them: arrives before, sits beneath, pulls against. No relation, no thread. That constraint is what stops the picture becoming wallpaper.
The panels never invert
Left is always your material, right is always the reading, across all four screens. The eye never has to re-learn the page, which is what lets the visual layer get as expressive as it does.
Light and dark are authored, not derived
Every token is declared twice rather than inverted. Dark is cinematic and signals arrive out of depth. Light is a gallery wall, where the card lifts by shadow instead of by contrast.
Process
4 directions built. One kept.
Every direction was built, not sketched, so each verdict was made on something I could actually use. The firing animation survived all of them and became The Reading.
Direction 01
The Loom
A personal essay read on a loom, with five emotional registers woven as ribbons across a portrait.
Dropped. The metaphor carried a mood but very little information, and the result lacked taste.
Direction 02
The aurora sky
A painted night sky where each passage fired a node, threads pulsed between them, and the nodes gathered into a figure.
Dropped, except for one idea: signals firing as the passage is read, with threads between them.
- No capture kept
Direction 03
The scroll journey
One long scroll in four chapters over a single sky that never reset.
Dropped. I redesigned the arrival myself in Figma and rebuilt the product as four working pages.
Where it landed
Submitted inside the 48 hours as a public, working product rather than a set of frames: an arrival page and four connected pages, authored in both themes, with a narrated walkthrough. It runs as a single self-contained file, with no account and nothing leaving the device. I then put it in front of writers I know and watched them use it cold.
In their words
I sent a paragraph I thought sounded certain. Siloët showed me it read like an apology. That’s the version people were actually receiving.
It doesn’t tell me what to feel about my own writing. It just shows me where the hedging lives — and lets me decide if it belongs there.
I used it on a caption I almost didn’t post. Turns out the warmth was there, it just needed one line to lead with it.
Most tools grade your writing. This one just reflects it back — quietly, without a score attached.
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