Cloud Sketches App
Tools: Figma, Cursor, Swift
Cloud Sketches is a one-feature app for capturing the fleeting shapes we see in the sky.
A digital sketchbook designed not just to document imagination, but to spark a deeper curiosity about the natural world around us.
Draw what you see in the clouds
Learn about the cloud with (invisible) AI
When I open the app, I see my gallery of past sketches. When I see a cloud that inspires me, I take a photo. Then, the app presents a simple canvas for me to trace the shape I see—a turtle, a dragon, a face. I can name it and save it to my collection.
At first, this was the entire experience. But the app evolved with my own curiosity. After a sketch is saved, the app now quietly attaches atmospheric data like temperature and wind speed.
Finally, a gentle, intelligent layer offers a starting point for learning. It identifies the cloud type and, if I'm interested, suggests a question to explore—turning a simple drawing into a doorway for scientific discovery.
Cloud Sketches is built around the philosophy of invisible AI. Following the spirit of situated software—software designed for a particular context—the app feels less like a product and more like a personal ritual.
Most educational AI wants to be the main event: the chatbot, the tutor. This project explores the opposite: AI as quiet infrastructure. The technology succeeds not when a user is impressed by its sophistication, but when they forget it’s there and become completely absorbed in their own curiosity about the sky.
I designed this app based on the environment and conditions I wanted my learning habits to grow within. I like to think of these as the app’s values.
The driving philosophy behind Cloud Sketches is that the best technology gets out of the way.
The app is designed to encourage second-order thinking—the crucial shift from what you see to why you're seeing it—and it achieves this through a principle of invisible intelligence.
Instead of a loud, attention-seeking AI, the app's intelligence is subtle and subordinate. It waits for you to first engage your own creativity. Only after you have observed and drawn does it quietly offer a doorway to deeper understanding.
This intentional sequence is the core of the experience.
To honor the app's core purpose of drawing and personal observation, every visual component was hand-drawn. From the icons to the buttons and even the error messages, the interface is meant to feel like a page in a personal sketchbook.
Custom Camera Interface
Drawing Pad
Learning Page
Building this app was an exercise in layering intelligence.
The process involved integrating location and weather data with Google's Vision and Gemini APIs to create a flow that moves seamlessly from user input to creative output and finally to guided learning.
1. Integrating multiple APIs (Google Vision, Gemini, Weather data) to create a seamless, intelligent user flow that feels simple on the front end.
2. Designing an interface where technology feels subordinate to the user's creative and learning process, ensuring the tool never overshadows the subject.
3. Crafting prompts and educational guardrails for an AI model to generate curiosity-driven questions rather than just dry, factual answers.
4. The power of building hyper-specific software that serves a personal need, as it provides clarity and a strong philosophical foundation for every feature.