Case study
Pretzel
A design library that mostly runs itself.
Pretzel is a library of design worth keeping: shots, websites, launches and well-made objects, each credited to the person who made it. I built it because I save far more than I ever find again.
I designed, built and run it alone, alongside my job leading mobile design at Deel.
- Role
- Solo. Product, brand, design and build
- Timeline
- Two weekends to build
- Scope
- Capture, browsing, tagging, goodies, jobs, brand and automation
- Live
- pretzel.design
01A pile, not a library
I saved work everywhere: bookmarks on X, reels on Instagram, links in notes. None of it was searchable, and when a post was deleted, its video went with it.
So I set three rules. Saving takes two taps. Finding takes one search. The whole thing runs without me. I have a day job and no team, so anything that repeats runs on a schedule, and anything that needs taste stays with me.
02Saving where the scrolling happens
Saving lives in the iOS Share Sheet. Tap Share on a post in X or Instagram, pick Save To Site, and an iPhone Shortcut sends the link to Pretzel’s save API. The sheet closes and I keep scrolling. A few seconds later the phone shows a one-line receipt.
The receipt says exactly what happened: title, creator, date, how many files came with it, and whether it went live.
Bookmarks pulled in from X wait in a review queue. Phone saves skip it, because choosing to share something is already the approval. The trade-off is the odd card that goes live unfinished.
Pretzel copies every image and video into its own storage, so a card survives the original post being deleted. Every card credits its creator by name.
03A wall that moves and stays calm
Most design on X and Instagram is motion, so every shot on the wall plays. To keep that calm: five columns at most, generous gaps, and nothing on a card but the work until you hover. Every wall follows the same rules, from launches to books.
Navigation sits in a small dock at the bottom (an idea from brrranding), so the top of the screen belongs to the work. If a browser blocks autoplay, the wall falls back to stills instead of breaking.
Anyone can browse. At the end of each wall, one card asks you to join, with one line: Good design, picked by hand.
04Sorting is a design problem
The first version tagged posts with a vision model and a list of 20+ tags. Over 1,000 of the 1,100+ posts came back Minimal, and Parallax was on none. The filters narrowed nothing.
Before · 20+ tags
Posts carrying each tag, of 1,100+
- Minimal1,000+
- Vibrant400+
- Cursor Effect3
- Brutalist1
- Parallax0
Meanwhile the Typography, 3D and Editorial walls held 0, 1 and 2 shots, and the 600+ goodies had no tags at all.
After · 100+ tags in nine contexts
A sample, by context
- Color
- DarkCreamOrangePastelGradient
- Style
- EditorialBrutalistPlayfulGlassmorphismHand-drawn
- Interaction
- HoverScrollCursorParallax
- Element
- ButtonNavigationPricingTypography
- Material
- BrassWoodCast iron
- Gift for
- A designerA coffee person
The rule the model works to
“Minimal” needs a reason beyond “clean” or “simple”: say what is absent and why that is the point.
The fix was the vocabulary, not the prompt. I rebuilt it as 100+ tags in nine contexts, with separate sets for design and for goodies. Each tag needs a reason the model can point to: at least one colour and one style, and no more than two from the same context. Nothing changes until I approve it on a review page.
Smaller details followed. A category with fewer than five posts hides instead of showing an empty wall, and every tag on a card links to more like it.
05A shelf of goodies
Goodies are well-made objects, 600+ of them across eight categories, from Braun clocks to cast iron pans. They’re the objects at the top of this page.
They come from hundreds of shops, each with its own photography, so every photo is cut out on a transparent background and the shelf looks like one shoot. When I couldn’t confirm the exact product, the link is a search, not a guess.
06A job board nobody has to update
Every morning Pretzel reads the public careers pages of design-led companies, including Figma, Stripe, Vercel, Anthropic, Linear, Duolingo and Deel, and keeps only the design roles.
There’s no AI here. A list of title patterns decides what counts as a design role, and a second list removes near misses like policy or sales, so every listing can be explained. Roles that disappear from a company’s site come down within two days. Companies can also pay to post a role, and it goes up only after I approve it.
Next to it sit Tools, the apps worth keeping in a design stack, and Skills, the AI agent skills worth installing.
07Chores on a clock, judgement with me
When you run something alone, the risk is that it quietly stops. So everything that repeats runs on a schedule.
- Jobs refreshcareers pages read, design roles kept
- New launches arrivefrom Product Hunt
- My bookmarks arrivefrom X, waiting for my yes
- Morning summaryon my phone, with anything gone quiet
- Threads worth a replyevery fourth morning
- Posts go outX and Instagram, three hours apart, 9 to 9
- Weekly cutsa product reel on Mondays, a carousel on Thursdays
Pretzel posts the most opened shots to X and Instagram, credited and with the original video. Each Reel gets a cover cut for the 3:4 profile grid. Captions come from a small set of lines I wrote, so the preview I check is what goes out.
Every fourth morning it finds threads on X where people ask designers to share their work, and sends me the best few. The Reply button opens X with a draft. It never posts on its own, so every reply is still mine.
Instead of a dashboard, a Telegram bot messages me at nine: what’s waiting for review, how many jobs are live, what went out. It also shows how long since each job last ran, because a scheduled job that stops fails silently. I found that out when the job sync broke for a week and nothing told me.
Pretzel
bot
Jobs: 40+ live, synced 49h ago ← stale
Posted: 4 in the last day, last 2h ago09:00
08Measuring questions, not numbers
Every analytics event answers a specific question. Does the gate bring in new people? Which walls hold attention? What do people search for that isn’t there? There are no session recordings and no profiles of individual people.
09Where it stands
Counted on 16 October.
1,200+
published posts
1,000+
creators credited by name
600+
goodies on the shelf
40+
live design roles at 10 companies
10Building for fun
In April I wrote The illusion of productivity, about everyone shipping an app in a weekend because not shipping feels like falling behind. Then I built Pretzel in two weekends. Is this the thing I was warning about? Maybe. Maybe not.
The difference I can feel is why. I wasn’t building to keep up. I was building because it’s fun. I genuinely love playing with these new tools, and every few weeks another one makes something possible that wasn’t before. It feels like being in Disneyland without enough time: I want to try every ride, and I rarely stay on one long enough to go deep.
Where I’m less sure is everything after the build. Pretzel posts to X and Instagram on its own, but a scheduled post isn’t distribution. The things that would actually grow it are the ones my post was wary of: being visible, posting in public, showing up every day.
If I didn’t have a full-time job, that’s where the time would go, not into features. Short UGC videos of designers saving and finding work, made by designers rather than by me. Asking the 1,000+ creators Pretzel credits to share their own cards. Talking every week to the people who save the most.
I still don’t know which side of my own post Pretzel falls on. For now, I’m enjoying the rides.