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
Hidden Space is a workspace for creative people working with AI — projects, image and video generation, reusable elements and presets, and a dashboard that shows where your time actually went.
Two days before the challenge showed up I'd been messing with the rawest possible version of this idea — vibe-coding with ChatGPT late at night, no system behind it, mostly just checking whether the thing in my head could exist at all. I wasn't planning anything.
Then the Flowstep challenge landed on Contra, and the timing was almost annoying, because at that point I couldn't pretend I wasn't going to try.
So I thought, fine. Let's do this one properly.
Somewhere around the second prototype it stopped being a submission. I'd wanted this tool for about two years and never had the skill-stack to build it, and suddenly I was designing it instead of describing it to someone who'd never build it either.
Seven screens later it's live, running on production data. I used it for client work this week.
01 · What it is
Hidden Space is a workspace for creative people working with AI. Projects, image and video generation, reusable elements and presets, a gallery that remembers your settings, and a dashboard that shows where your time actually went.
The whole thing sits on one idea: the platform should stay out of the way of the work. The video walks through all of it, so I won't repeat that here. A few things from the process instead.
02 · The colour question got solved by looking
I've spent years of my career debating colour in the abstract and getting nowhere.
This time I rendered three whole directions — achromatic, violet, turquoise — as full workspace screens with the same composition, put them next to each other, and just looked. Achromatic came out stylish and completely impersonal, which I honestly didn't expect. Violet came alive.
Took minutes. I keep thinking about how much time I've wasted not working that way.
03 · Locking the system before the screens
That's what kept the build from drifting. All seven screens were designed in Flowstep against one design system, same tokens and same accent rule, screen after screen.
One accent colour in three tiers. Solid on the primary action. A faint wash on whatever's active. Flat neutral grey everywhere else.
That rule survived production without bending once, which surprised me more than it should have.
04 · I got something wrong, so I'll say it
All seven screens matched their references and I was ready to call the whole thing shipped. Then a small icon bug pushed me into an actual audit, and I found out that "this screen is rebuilt" and "this screen is migrated" were two different claims, and I'd been treating them as one.
Cost me time. Saved the foundation.
If you're moving fast with AI in the loop, verify the thing you're claiming instead of inferring it from your own changelog.
05 · Four tools, four jobs
Flowstep — the design surface. Editable screens I could keep reworking instead of redrawing.
Claude — product reasoning, and the decisions behind the design system.
Claude Code — the production rebuild.
Codex — a second pass over the implementation as it landed.
Underneath all of it the foundation got rebuilt too, from 1,464 lines of hand-written CSS to TypeScript, Tailwind and owned Base UI primitives running on Cloudflare.
06 · What I'd take from it
I didn't have to become an engineer for any of this. I had to know exactly what I wanted and stay disciplined about the system.
That's the part I'd want other freelancers here to hear. The tool you keep wishing existed is a lot closer than it was a year ago.
07 · What's next
7/7 shipped, and that's the foundation rather than the finish line.
Script agents that carry a script through to a storyboard. Audio in the same workspace. Shared styles and a community library that grows the more people use it.
Thank you
To Contra and the Flowstep team, genuinely. These challenges keep pushing the edge of what's possible, and this one pushed me well past mine.
Flowstep's groundwork is what made the difference — the design guide, screens I could keep reworking, MCP into Claude Code and Codex, iteration measured in minutes instead of rebuilds.
I came for a challenge and left with a foundation. Thank you for that.
Try it yourself
Don't take my word for any of it, go walk around inside it. The login below opens the working product on production data.
And if something in there annoys you, tell me. That's how it gets better.
😎 Dropping more in the comments — screens, the bits that got cut, and a few things that went sideways on the way.
⚠️ Links
Presentation
Hidden Space — the working product. Sign in and explore: projects, gallery, presets, elements, dashboard. Generation and sharing are switched off on this demo account, everything else is open.
Username: Flowstep
Password: Contra
Flowstep screens
Figma — behind the process
The rest of the screens — plus the alternate login I almost went with.
It looked epic. I sat with it far longer than I should have. Then I had to admit the obvious: this is a workspace for working with AI models, not the login to an MMORPG 😎
All the images inside the product I generated myself too.
A few numbers, since the screens don't show what's underneath.
288 commits in seven days. Around 45,000 lines written, 7,000 of them deleted along the way — about 12,000 survived into what's live now.
Busiest days were the first and the last: 76 commits on...
Posted the whole build story over on X, with a few things that didn't fit here.
Come say hi — I'd genuinely like to see more of the Contra crowd over there. Always curious what everyone's actually working on.
...
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
Trending
Claude
Claude has entered the design space. How are you using Claude Design?
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?
freelancerlife
Freelancer life is wins, pivots, and everything in between. What’s yours right now?
Related posts
My entry for the Contra × Squarespace challenge.
This was my first time building a website with Squarespace, and I honestly loved the experience. It was surprisingly easy to create something that feels premium without writing any code.
For this project, I explored the new Finish Layer features, including Block Animations and Block Transforms, to make the website feel more dynamic and polished.
Sharing both the final website and a behind-the-scenes video of the process.
Check it out: https://pigeon-carillon-nw53.squarespace.com/
This looks clean and well thought out. How long did it take you to bring everything together?
Hi! I joined the Flowstep Challenge to build Partnero AI 👫
To move fast, I’m combining Claude Code Extension in Visual Studio Code with Flowstep MCP✨
The mission of Partnero AI is to help people cope with emotions and find creative ways to resolve difficulties.
😭 😱 😡 --> ☺️ 🥰 🥳
P.S. I'm new to Contra. Let's connect! ☺️
can't wait to see your build
For the Contra x Envato Challenge, 'Human by Design', we built a brand identity and animated a promo video for 'Olo', an accessible crypto-trading platform.
To us, the core of this challenge wasn't about creating more content with AI, but about maintaining one clear creative direction. When drawing from a massive library of separate AI generations, stock footage, fonts, and music, a project can easily turn into a disjointed visual mess. Envato served as our entire toolkit - from AI-generated audio and assets to stock templates and typography.
But every asset still had to answer one crucial question: 'Does this truly feel like Olo'? Guided by the brand promise of making crypto trading accessible for everyone, everywhere, human instinct drove the entire creative process:
1. Curating over generating: Rejecting raw AI outputs that felt flat or out of context and ruthlessly filtering for what actually worked.
2. Building a visual identity: Applying custom effects to transform generic stock footage into a unified aesthetic.
3. Directing the flow: Motion design, precise typography, and timing every single movement to the rhythm of the music in After Effects. Envato Stock and AI tools dramatically accelerate the build process, but it’s the human creator who infuses the soul. It provides the ingredients, but art direction, taste, and instinct define the quality of the final result.
Toolkit: Envato (Envato AI, Stock, Fonts, Audio) + After Effects & Adobe Illustrator.
Brand DesignCreative Design Motion DesignAdobe After EffectsEnvatoenvatochallengeaftereffectsbranding
Nice🔥