The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
Lost in time, found in frames.
Every ruin holds a story that time could never erase. Some places don't need words; their silence speaks for centuries.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Related posts
What if one of the most meaningful messages you ever receive… is written by a version of you that no longer exists?
That question became Dear Future my submission for the #Base44Challenge.
We save photos.
We save messages.
We save memories.
But we rarely preserve who we were in that exact moment what we were thinking, hoping for, afraid of, or becoming.
So I designed a digital time capsule where your words don’t just get stored.
They wait for you.
With Dear Future, you can:
✦ Write a letter to your future self or someone else
✦ Add memories and images
✦ Choose the exact future date it should return
✦ Personalize your capsule with colours and seals
✦ Seal it so it can’t be read or edited before its opening date
✦ Watch the countdown inside your personal archive
✦ Return later and experience the letter as something preserved not just another notification
But the biggest design challenge wasn’t creating a way to send a letter later.
It was designing the wait.
As a Senior Product & UI/UX Designer, I wanted every interaction to support that idea.
The archive.
The physical capsule metaphor.
The vintage television.
The sealing ritual.
The countdown.
The responsive mobile experience.
None of them are there just for decoration. Together, they turn anticipation into part of the product.
I designed the UX, visual system, interaction language, responsive experience, storytelling, and complete product flow then built and shipped the working experience with @Base44.
This project reminded me why I love product design:
A good interface helps someone complete a task.
A meaningful experience makes them feel something while doing it.
Dear Future Words outlive the moment.
Experience the project ↓
Dear future capsule
Would you write something for yourself five years from now?
☀️ The glass is blank. The wall isn't.
Hold it up to a window and there's nothing on it.
No print. No paint.
Then the sun comes through,
and a face lands on the wall.
That's a caustic lens.
Clear acrylic, its surface shaped so precisely that sunlight draws a picture.
They're beautiful, and almost nobody sells them.
Every single one needs its own optics solve.
🔆 HELIODOR
A studio that writes a name, or a face, in sunlight.
Type a name, or drop in a photo.
Your browser solves the lens. No server, no AI credits.
A ray-traced proof shows the light before anything is cut.
Then it checks the glass.
The portrait in the video: 3.3° slope, 3.6 mm deep, match 0.80.
Ready to cut.
From your city and your window, it finds every day the light is sharp
and adds them to your calendar.
Photos were the hard part.
A full-contrast face came out 7.1 mm deep, over the 6 mm cut line.
So every photo now keeps a soft base glow.
Behind it runs a real workshop.
Orders move through each stage on the Workshop board.
Today's lenses nest onto one acrylic sheet.
Approved pieces hang on the public Light Wall.
One photo.
One beam of sun.
Zero AI credits.
So whose face goes on your wall?
The sun does the rest. ✨
🛠️ Built in Base44: the app, the data, the sign-in and the hosting.
Make yours 👇
HELIODOR
This is such a creative concept! Turning natural sunlight into a medium for portrait creation is a genuinely unique idea. I especially like how you've connected the creative side with a practical workflow, from checking light conditions to production and order tracking. The zero-AI-credits aspect makes it even more interesting!
It started with one image.
A skull.
I couldn't stop looking at it. It felt like it was alive and dying at the same time.
So I kept going.
Each version felt like the same soul dying in a new color.
Then I thought… what if it actually moved?
So I took my Firefly images and brought them to life with the new Kling 4.0
No camera.
No studio.
Just one skull and a feeling I had to follow.
This is "Pigment of the Dead."
Sound on 🔊
