Warmly is a collaborative digital greeting card where anyone with the link can add a note, photo, sticker or drawing to the same card. No accounts. No sign-ups. Just one link to pass around.
I conceived, designed and built Warmly independently, from the first prototype to the working product.
Try WarmlyThe idea started with a small annoyance.
Whenever someone was leaving the office or celebrating a birthday, someone would buy a physical card and pass it around.
Then came the chasing.
Making the card digital seemed obvious.
But I didn’t want to digitise away the part that made physical cards nice in the first place.
The handwriting is inconsistent. Someone squeezes their message into a corner. Another person adds a ridiculous drawing. A photo ends up somewhere unexpected.
That messiness is part of the charm.
Choose who the card is for, the occasion and the format.
Warmly gives you one link.
That link is the invitation.
No account creation. No onboarding. No workspace to join.
Anyone with the link can add:
Notes · Photos · Stickers · Drawings
Everything lives together on one shared canvas.
People can move things, resize them, rotate them and arrange the card however they like.
When the card is done, it can be downloaded as a PDF.
It’s now live, with saved cards, photo uploads and real-time sync.
With no brand to inherit, I had to decide what Warmly should feel like.
Warmly needed personality, but I didn’t want the interface itself to become overly cute.
Most of the expression should come from the card people create, not from decorative UI surrounding it.
The card canvas can become colourful and chaotic. The interface around it stays relatively restrained.
Over time, I deliberately pulled the brand orange back and reserved it for only a few moments, while primary actions became near-black and selection states became more neutral.
I deliberately avoided the patterns that make collaborative products feel heavy.
If you have the link, you can join the card.
Instead, your browser remembers which notes are yours.
People drag, draw, resize, rotate, pinch and type.
That meant mobile could not simply be a smaller version of desktop.
The mobile experience eventually gained its own top and bottom controls, simplified menus and pinch-based zoom rather than trying to squeeze the desktop interface onto a phone.
I also removed an auto-zoom interaction I had spent a long time refining. It looked good in isolation, but on an iPhone the keyboard and the suggestion bar above it covered the note being typed.
Every phone’s keyboard behaves differently, so there was no zoom level I could rely on. Removing it was the simpler, more reliable choice.
Selection controls also had to remain usable while the canvas zoomed.
Instead of shrinking and growing with the card, the manipulation handles were designed to stay roughly the same size on screen.
A shared card only feels shared if everyone is looking at the same thing.
When one person added, moved or deleted something, the change appeared on everyone else’s screen straight away.
Without that, two people could end up editing something that was no longer there.
Once Warmly was live, I asked five friends to try it.
The feedback was mostly positive, but two requests stood out.
You can only edit what you wrote.
With no accounts, letting anyone edit anything would mean anyone could remove someone else’s message. A card only works if people trust that what they wrote stays theirs.
I haven’t added these yet.
They are reasonable requests, but each one makes the canvas noisier and the toolbar heavier. Anything I add next will need to earn its place.
As Warmly became more capable, the harder design problem wasn’t adding features.
It was keeping the product feeling simple.
Every new tool pulled it a little closer to becoming another Photoshop, with more buttons, more menus and more to learn. But a card for a birthday or a farewell shouldn’t feel intimidating to make.
Simplicity doesn’t protect itself. It has to be defended, one feature at a time.
Warmly started as a small response to an annoying office ritual.
It taught me something broader:
