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By Hand helps preserve the knowledge and craft of India's endangered heritage textiles.
Through a series of interactive, game-like interfaces, you learn how these textiles are made, step by step, becoming part of a digital textile workshop. You don't just read about the craft; you practise it
Three interactive, game-like makers guide you through the real process, step by step: block-printing Ajrakh, weaving Muga silk, and stitching Banjara embroidery. Every piece you complete joins one growing collective quilt.
Every piece you make is sewn into one growing collective quilt - a shared archive stitched by everyone who takes part in preserving these heritage textiles, because these crafts aren't vanishing from the shelves. They're vanishing from the hands that know how to make them.
Three endangered crafts. One shared cloth. Built in Figma Make.
Here is the working link to the site - https://byhand.figma.site
Here is the social media post Link
Built using Figma Make, Figma Weave, and Figma Design.
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Did you know your home reflects how much you read?
Not a metaphor. A literal one.
Add a book. Set a timer. Watch your apartment slowly come alive as you read. Dust clears in real time. Rooms bloom from neglect to warmth. Stop reading and watch it all fade back.
The Problem
Most reading trackers are lists. Cold. Forgettable. They record what you have not done without making you feel anything about it. You open the app, see a number, close the app. Nothing changes inside you.
Shelf Life is built around a different belief. Your habits should live somewhere. They should breathe. They should have consequences you can see.
Your bedroom holds the book you read before sleep. Your kitchen holds the article you meant to finish over coffee. Your study holds the essay you keep putting off. Read consistently and each space blooms back to life through an organic dust clearing animation driven by your actual reading time. Neglect your reading and the dust returns. Your home becomes a mirror of your habits. Honest and quiet and impossible to ignore.
I deliberately chose not to let users upload or read books inside the app. The moment you can read inside a tracker it stops being a tracker and starts competing with the experience of actually holding a book. Shelf Life honours the ritual of reading without replacing it.
How It Was Built
I started with a design philosophy before I started with a prompt. Warmth. Craft. Human first. Every decision was made to make the user feel something not just complete a task.
The isometric apartment and all ten room images including the neglected and bloomed states for each of the five rooms were generated entirely using Figma Weave. I used Figma for rapid design ideation and layout exploration before moving into Figma Make.
In Figma Make I built the full app in React and TypeScript. The core technical challenge was the dust clearing animation. It uses an SVG mask system with organic circular spots growing via requestAnimationFrame running in parallel with the reading timer. Each spot has its own delay and duration so the reveal feels natural and alive rather than mechanical. The same spots reverse in mirror order when the room returns to neglected. The animation runs both ways. Forward when you read. Backward when you stop.
Room specific ambient music plays in each space. The bedroom has soft rain and piano. The kitchen has morning acoustic warmth. The living room has fireplace crackle. The study is near silence. Each room sounds like it feels.
Tools Used
Figma Weave for AI image generation across all ten room backgrounds
Figma for design ideation and layout
Figma Make for the full app built in React and TypeScript
The Moment That Matters
Start a reading timer. Watch your room slowly clean itself in real time. Organic dust spots grow across the image revealing the bloomed version beneath. It is not a progress bar. It is not a percentage. It is your home breathing back to life because you chose to read.
When the timer ends the room holds its bloomed state then gradually returns to neglect. The direction of the animation tells you everything about your relationship with reading that week.
Most people go quiet when they watch it happen for the first time.
Excellent presentation 👏
Traditional museums preserve what changed the world.
What about the objects that changed you?
The train ticket you never threw away.
The toy you carried everywhere.
The watch your grandfather wore every day.
The sketch that started your career.
The random object sitting in a drawer that somehow means everything.
I'm building People's Museum, a digital museum where anyone can preserve one meaningful object and the story behind it.
No likes. No followers. No algorithms.
Just people, objects, and the reasons they matter.
If you could preserve one object forever, what would it be?
The concept is strong, but the execution makes it even better. Great work!
I built an anonymous corner for the internet. It's called the Fruit Market. 🍊🍓
Every visitor leaves behind a unique fruit that represents them.
You choose a fruit, give it a label, add a few pieces of identity, and answer a prompt about something you're carrying, longing for, or wishing someone understood.
Then you place it on the shelf.
The result is a market full of anonymous human artifacts:
A mango who is missing home.
A peach who is terrified of graduating.
A dragon fruit who is searching for purpose.
The idea came from a question:
How deeply can we understand each other when names are removed?
Built with Figma and Figma Make on my humble phone and tablet. My goal was to create a whimsical, imperfect, yet vulnerable space that feels somewhere between a community bulletin board, a missed-connections page, and a message in a bottle.
Please, if you’re willing, leave a piece of yourself at the Fruit Market. <3
Website: thefruitmarket.figma.site
LinkedIn Post (feel free to connect!): https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7471214902842470401/
Figma Community Link (a copy of the website w/o the backend): https://www.figma.com/community/file/1647270469719499321
Made for the Contra x Figma Makeathon.
Wonderful and worth th build
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