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
I'm a UI designer. Spent years hoarding UI screenshots, 3D icons, illustrations. Pinterest, Dribbble, Figma, desktop, random folders.
The constant nightmare: I need a tab bar. Or an empty state with illustration. Right now. I know I saved something like this. Three months ago. Somewhere, lol.
Built a desktop app to kill my own pain. Files on disk, plain folders, sync via Google Drive / Dropbox / iCloud. No cloud lock-ins. That was the easy part.
The hard part - search.
Off-the-shelf vision models are useless for UI. Dropped a Linear screenshot into CLIP - it sees "a computer screen with text". Thanks, super informative, lol.
They were trained on cats and landscapes, not on interfaces.
What ended up working - a combo of four layers. OCR pulls button labels, headings, body copy from every image. On top of that, a vision model with my own prompt dictionary for UI patterns: modal, toast, tabs, empty state, chart, dashboard. Wrote the dictionary myself, from what I actually look for. Plus manual tags users drop in two clicks. And fuzzy search over filenames as a fallback.
Now "settings" pulls up settings screens even when the word isn't on the image. "empty state" pulls illustrations of these screens, not random app shells. Closer to how I actually search. By what's in the image. Not by filename.
Not perfect. Dense dashboards still confuse the model. Auto-tags are rough. But this is the first reference manager I built that I actually use myself.
Curious - what else could I tweak in the search logic to make it work sharper?
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
Designed two variations of a hero UI for a client.
would love your take - A or B?
37 voted
44%
48 voted
56%
85 votes
Closed
looks awesome
Claude Design built me a client-ready onboarding flow in 30 minutes.
Here's the trick that made it work...
Before touching a single screen, I made it define the full design system first. Colors, type scale, spacing, components. Only then did I start building on top of it.
What got me is that all 5 screens actually looked like they belonged together. Every other AI tool I've tried loses consistency after 2-3 screens. This one didn't.
Sometimes it’s not about the design. The user just “can’t see”.
They don’t understand where to look, what matters, or what to do next. And they won’t figure it out - they just leave.
That’s why we don’t start with visuals. We start with logic: what the user needs to do, how the flow works, and where their attention goes in the first seconds.
Only then - design. Clarity is the foundation.
What do you focus on first?
This is *the* approach. A strong strategy supports a strong design system!
Trending
Runway
AI video generation is exploding. What are you dreaming up in Runway?
Contra University
Learn from expert creatives how to earn more using next-gen AI tools.
creativeaiflow
Creative AI workflows are evolving. What tools do you use, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?
portfolioreview
The best portfolios tell a story, not just show a grid. Share yours for feedback.
freelancerlife
Freelancer life is wins, pivots, and everything in between. What’s yours right now?