kindling.

a quiet notebook for the people you love. write small notes when they come up. when it's time to give them a gift, kindling remembers what you noticed.

every other social app rewards you for posting. kindling rewards you for paying attention to someone else.

live: https://kindling-ten.vercel.app

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demo

a 20-second walk through the flow: empty shelf → sample bookshelf → opening maa's volume → writing in an entry with a margin annotation → asking kindling for a birthday idea → three gift suggestions arriving like a letter.

higher-quality mp4: docs/demo/walkthrough.mp4

screens

shelf — empty	shelf — samples

volume page (top)	entries with margin notes

ask panel	pencil-line loading

three ideas	do-not-get-them + verdict

populated shelf	hover a spine

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what it is

a single-page web app for keeping a commonplace book about the people you love — not a feed, not a contact list, not a crm. notes stay in your browser. nothing syncs, nothing uploads. if you clear your browser data the notebook goes with it. this is intentional.

three pre-built sample notebooks (maa, riya, james) ship with the app so the demo works offline, with no keys, in under a minute.

stack

• react 19 + vite 6
• tailwind css v4
• framer motion (subtle animations only)
• localStorage for persistence
• deployed to vercel

no backend. no accounts. no api keys required to run the samples.

the design

the ui is a commonplace book, not a dashboard:

• shelf — your people appear as cloth-bound book spines on a wooden shelf. hover a spine to read its title; click to open the volume. overdue people get a red ribbon bookmark peeking out the top.
• volume page — an open book spread on a warm tan desk: deckle-edge inner border, centre-binding shadow, faded monogram, ribbon bookmark, and a fleuron rule under the header. entries are dated like diary entries, with quiet olive pencil-margin annotations slightly rotated in the left gutter.
• ask kindling — type an occasion, wait for a pencil line to draw across the page, and read three gift ideas written in the voice of a very close older cousin who has been paying attention.

palette: warm paper (#FAF6EE), cream, linen, deep indigo ink, soft burnt ember, olive pencil. typefaces: fraunces, literata, ibm plex serif, ibm plex mono.

run locally

npm install
npm run dev

reproduce the demo

npm run dev                       # in one terminal
npx playwright install chromium   # once, if not already installed
node scripts/capture-demo.mjs     # writes docs/demo/*.jpg + walkthrough.{mp4,gif}

build + deploy

npm run build
vercel deploy --prod

the voice (a quick guide)

• lowercase throughout. british spelling. no em dashes.
• never uses: thoughtful, meaningful, curated, special, celebrate, unlock, perfect.
• references specific notes, not generic demographics.
• if a line could appear in a moonpig email, it gets rewritten.

thesis, in one sentence

every other social app rewards you for posting. kindling rewards you for paying attention to someone else.