I designed the UI and set creative direction for a children's iPad app aimed at empowering kids to create their own stories and experience the magic of publishing a real app to the App Store by themselves.

Inspired by childhood story tapes with books my grandma used to send and the early days of learning to code while in design school, Cabbit Tales began as an idea for a small friend who grows with the user like a Tamagotchi that talks (I was imagining Link's fairy from Ocarina of Time). During COVID-19, it became the foundation for a kid-driven publishing tool that produced real, App-Store-ready storybooks.

Cabbit Tales started as a personal idea I’d carried since design school, a small companion who lived with the user, guiding them through stories (kind of what my grandma did for me with books and reading tapes), choices, and gentle challenges. Part choose-your-own-adventure, part Tamagotchi, but with purpose: help kids learn logic, math, and reading through a character that feels alive. ‍ The spark returned near the end of my studies at design school when I first encountered HTML, CSS, and JavaScript together as part of a design project. I immediately sensed a future where design and code would merge, and I began imagining how the childhood experience of listening to story tapes from my grandmother could evolve into something interactive, adaptive, and modern. ‍ When the pandemic hit, a friend and former co-worker asked me to join and co-found Virid Digital that he had started a bit earlier. I used Cabbit Tales as the anchor project to introduce something creative, hopeful, and technically interesting at a moment when the world needed all three. As the team grew, so did the input. The project shifted from an evolving companion to a kid-powered publishing platform, enabling children to create stories in Figma and publish them directly to the App Store. The slogan “By Kids for Kids” naturally emerged.

The challenge became personal as well as creative:
How do I protect the essence of my original idea while guiding a team toward an expanded product vision during a chaotic global moment?