IRL Studio (From Personal Habit to Platform)

Originally a self-initiated exercise that grew into a product. For 35 days I generated a brief and designed a landing page in under an hour, practice to stay sharp. From original to platform for other designers: a Figma plugin that generates the brief, locks the artefacts on the canvas, and enforces a 60-minute timer, paired with a companion web app for exposure, critique, reactions, and reflection.

Designers, if they practise at all, practise in unrealistic conditions: open-ended briefs, infinite time, no peer pressure, no critique loop. My own 35-day challenge sharpened my judgement faster than any portfolio piece - but it lived in my head, with no structure and no way to measure my work against anyone else's. The same gap scales across the industry: portfolios that don't translate to commercial work, vocabulary that buckles under stakeholder pressure, juniors who freeze at their first real constraint. The tools to fix this didn't exist when I started in 2020; now they do - so I built a forcing function with a feedback loop.

• —A personal habit is a product signal. The 35-day challenge wasn't a project - it was a behaviour I'd already adopted. Building for problems you've already felt is a good place to start - you scope better and ship faster.
• —Ship the constraint, not the tool. The value lives in the 60-minute timer and the locked artefacts. Every decision - no editing after submit, pre-baked briefs, variety of briefs, no timer extensions - compounds the constraint instead of softening it.
• —Harden before there's anything to harden against. Five layers of defence and a 1,500-row brief bank (~$1.50 once, ≈$0/click after) went in before the first user - less fast-paced strategy however, the cheapest time to fix abuse and runaway cost is when there's no traffic to break.