PRODUCT BUILD

Paper Critters

Solo Business, 2026
Full-stack product ownership across strategy, design, and engineering

OVERVIEW

PROJECT OVERVIEW

PROJECT Overview

A child-directed creative app, designed, architected, and built solo.

Kids decorate a 3D paper toy character with stickers, then print their creation as a foldable paper toy. I own every layer of this product: product strategy, UX, visual design system, and system architecture.

When AI models get updated, the prompts that power enterprise products can break in ways that are hard to predict. Fixing them could take thousands of hours.

I designed a centralized tool that gives enterprise teams visibility and control over the migration process, reducing a months-long operational effort into a guided, measurable workflow.

When AI models get updated, the prompts that power enterprise products can break in ways that are hard to predict. Fixing them could take thousands of hours.

I designed a centralized tool that gives enterprise teams visibility and control over the migration process, reducing a months-long operational effort into a guided, measurable workflow.

Web Application & Stack

Paper Critters is a Progressive Web App: installable, offline-capable, and distributed with no App Store, which sidesteps Apple's in-app purchase requirement and lets Stripe handle payments directly. The frontend is React and TypeScript with Three.js for real-time 3D rendering and sticker placement, saved locally first via Dexie.js (IndexedDB) so a design can be created without an account. The backend runs on Supabase (Postgres, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions) for data, accounts, and compliance-sensitive server logic like purchase verification, with a separate print service using pdf-lib, hosted on Vercel.

Stack: React, TypeScript, Three.js, Tailwind, Supabase (Auth, Postgres, Storage, Edge Functions), Stripe, pdf-lib, Sharp, Blender, Vercel.

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Product Strategy

One-time purchases, not subscriptions: $8 to unlock the creation and print tool, $3 for a gallery PDF, plus a free base sticker set with paid add-on sets. For a product where a parent pays and a child uses it, a recurring charge is the wrong trust model.

The product is legally child-directed, meaning every user is treated as a child by default. That single fact shaped how accounts, purchases, and data collection work before any screen was designed.

User Experience

Design principle: nothing a child does should require reading fine print or trusting a form.

No email required to use the app. Accounts use a system-generated username and password, with no free-text fields a child could put personal information into. Parent involvement is scoped to one moment, purchase, where a simple toggle adjusts the flow for adult versus child accounts.

ARCADE Design System

A token-driven visual system called Arcade: high-contrast, chunky, sharp-cornered, shipping light and dark from day one. Four type voices split by role (display, buttons, body, labels), a fixed brand palette layered under semantic tokens that remap per mode, and a signature hard-shadow button style that collapses on press.

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System Architecture

Built for compliance and scale from the start. User identity and parent identity are stored separately, with parent email captured only at purchase. Sticker content moves through defined states (draft, active, retired, revoked) so updates never break a user's saved work. Print rendering runs server-side with separate resolution tiers for editing versus final output. Anything that gates money or consent is verified server-side, never trusted from the client.