Creative Field Notes
A daily prompt for your creative practice.
The Origin
Creative Field Notes started in a room of twenty working creatives, a former agency studio head running the session, and a series of short exercises that did something I hadn't felt in a while: jolted my brain out of its defaults. None of the prompts produced finished work, but by the end, my notebook was full of strange, generative thinking and a refreshed sense of wonder.
I left wanting to keep this going as a daily practice — no pressure, just flow. So I built the thing I wanted to use. Small daily prompts that ask nothing of me except to show up and make it happen in my own notebook. AI meets analog, in practice.
The Decisions
I always start lofty — big ideas, bold choices — then step back and chisel away what doesn't earn its place. Same here. Early scope included an input field, a habit tracker, an archive. Through brainstorming with Claude and iterating in Figma, it became clear this app was meant to serve as a lightweight seed of an idea. So I cut, and then cut some more. Today's prompt, an ethereal image to inspire, and a way to see two more. Just enough to create a spark.
The visual design carried the same principle. A delicate, wispy experience. Full-bleed imagery, a serif for emphasis, generous whitespace, and a single dot signaling more.
The Build
Claude helped generate prompts in collaboration with me. I curated 50 for each themed day (combine, reverse, steal, constraint, invent, observe, ten uses), each stretching a different mode of thinking. Then I prompted my way through build. Claude Code wrote the Next.js scaffolding, GitHub held the repository, Vercel deployed it.
I have familiarity with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS, but the build was the most humbling and exciting part of the project. Two days of API errors, an authentication tangle, and a stretch of pasting commands into the terminal for a single screen.
In Practice
The app is live. I open it most mornings on my phone and give myself ten minutes with the prompt. Thoughts flow freely and openly from pen to notebook.
Right now I'm stress testing it on myself. Whether the practice holds. Whether a prompt at 8 a.m. quietly cascades into how I think about work later in the day. Whether the smallest version of this product is the right one, or whether something needs to come back.