Anith Vishwanath
Product Designer

Field Notes

A reference library for the things I save and forget.

Year
2026
Role
Designer and builder
Platform
Web
Team
Solo, with Claude
Medium
Built with Claude Code
Field Notes: an index of colour, kind, type and mood on the left, the combined palette across the top, and a grid of saved posters, photos and packaging
Browsing by colour, type, and mood.

Problem

I save images all the time and almost never open them again. They end up in a few different places, and I can't search any of them by colour or type. When I start a project, I can't find the green poster with the heavy grotesque type that I remember saving.

An Are.na channel of saved posters and layouts
A Pinterest board of saved posters, typography and 3D work
The same kind of saves, in two places.

Approach

Everything I save goes into one private Are.na channel. The site pulls the images from there with Are.na's API and reads the colours straight from the pixels. Claude suggests the rest: a kind, a type, mood words and alt text. I approve or dismiss each suggestion on a tagging page that shows one image at a time.

Claude suggests, I approve.

The layout went through three iterations. Boxed cards first, then rows of filters, then a plain index down the side. The cards competed with the images, and they looked generic. The filter rows took up about a third of the page. The index gives the entries more room. The filters are still there, just not as prominent. Claude Design came up with the last two layouts, from my prompts and direction.

The first Field Notes front page: a grid of boxed cards, each with an image, a palette strip and its kind and mood, with four filter dropdowns at the top right
The second Field Notes front page: rows of filters for colour, kind, type and mood across the top, above a grid of images with their kind, mood and type
The final Field Notes front page: an index of colour, kind, type and mood down the left, the combined palette across the top, and a grid of saved images
Each pass took something away.

Key decision

I wanted the site to be clear about where each piece of information comes from. The colours come from the pixels, using plain rules. Everything else is a suggestion from Claude, and it only counts once I've approved it. Each type line also says how sure I am: confirmed, guess or unsure.

A Field Notes entry page for a black poster with huge pink letters, showing its kind, mood, two type lines marked as guesses, credit, source and a palette table
What the tool counted, what it's guessing, and what I decided look different.

Plain rules still get things wrong. My colour filter kept counting backgrounds. The butterfly is pale green on black, but black takes up over half the image, so it picked up the neutral tag and turned up when I filtered for neutral. Now the filter ignores a plain background, and the palette still shows it. Before, 55 of the 65 entries carried the neutral tag. Now 11 do.

The Field Notes entry page for a pale green butterfly on black, before the filter change: its colour tags are green and neutral, and the black row in the palette table, 53.6%, is outlined
The same entry page after the filter change: its colour tags are green and teal, neutral is gone, and the black row in the palette table, still 53.6%, is outlined
Black is 53.6% of the butterfly. It no longer counts as its colour.
Filter by green and the butterfly is in. Filter by neutral and it's gone.

Outcome

It's live, with 65 entries and counting. I haven't measured anything yet. The test is whether I find the green poster with the heavy grotesque type that I remember saving. The mood and type words will need another look as the collection grows.

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