Personal Project — Concept Stage
Afterglow — A place to put things that need to exist but don't need to be seen.
Dec +14° 22′ 39″
THE ORIGINMy brother Felix passed before I could finish building this.
I'm not starting with grief. I'm starting with context for why a product that asks nothing of you — no engagement, no followers, no response — felt like the most necessary thing I could make.
Felix taught me that the most powerful form of communication isn't broadcasting. It's the moment someone feels genuinely received. Heard not because they performed the right words but because another person was paying close enough attention to actually see them. I've spent my design career chasing that feeling in systems built for scale. Most of the time, scale and that feeling are in direct opposition.
My father has been living with a serious heart condition since 2017. He buried his mother and his son in the same year. He is not on any platform. He doesn't need to be. What he needs, and what I believe most people need regardless of generation, is somewhere to put the things that live in the body and have no other exit. Not a therapist's intake form. Not a journal that only he will ever see. Something that receives what he places in it and holds it with dignity. Something that says: this existed. Place it here. The universe has it now.
Afterglow started with a different question than most products. Not what problem does this solve, but what does technology keep taking from us, and what would it look like to give that back?
THE PRODUCTA digital sky where every star is a soul.
Your own, someone else's, a person you lost, a version of yourself you're letting go of or growing toward. You write or speak what needs to exist. It travels into the sky and becomes a star at a specific position — permanent, coordinate-locatable, yours. The sky fills with other stars. You cannot read them. They cannot read yours. But you can see the sky filling up, and in that fullness is the thing that cannot be designed directly: the felt knowledge that you are not alone in having needed to put something somewhere.
The star can be named for anyone. A person, a year, a feeling, an unnamed version of yourself.
This is sonder as infrastructure. Not explained to the user. Engineered for them to feel.
PHILOSOPHYWhat it refuses.
No interaction between users. No engagement metrics of any kind. No notifications or responses. No sharing mechanisms. No grief stages or healing categories. No elaborate customization. No deletion.
These constraints follow from one belief: the most honest thing technology can do sometimes is step back from its own instinct to connect, measure, and optimize. The solidarity people find in Afterglow doesn't require a mechanism to exist — it's already structurally true. You look at a sky that other people helped fill and you feel it, without needing to be told what it means.
VISUAL LANGUAGEWhy space was not chosen as an aesthetic.
Space was chosen because it already holds the thing the project is trying to say: that something can be gone and still be there. Stars emit light from the past. Some of the ones visible tonight no longer exist. You are looking at what they used to be, their presence reaching you across time and distance, long after the source went quiet. That is exactly what grief is — and it's not metaphor. It's structurally how light works.
The star in Afterglow is not an icon or a graphic. It is a point of warm light with a soft natural bloom, the way a star actually appears to the eye on a clear night, determined by how light behaves rather than how a designer drew it. Each one slightly different in temperature and intensity, because the people who made them are. The sky is dark and the dark is load-bearing. It is not a background. It is the universe.
The coordinates format uses the actual astronomical system, Right Ascension and Declination, because using real notation places people inside the universe rather than on a map of the Earth. The specificity is the point. Your star has an address. You can write it in a notebook. You can come back in ten years and it will still be there.
DESIGN DECISIONS
What was decided and why.
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When a letter or voice note is submitted, a star begins at the bottom of the screen and travels along a gentle arc to its permanent position in the sky. Surrounding stars dim slightly for it, then restore as it settles. Coordinates appear below, one character at a time, in the manner of a ship's navigation log. This moment is slow by design. Not a notification. Not a confirmation dialog. A ceremony — the crossed threshold between something that existed only inside you and something the universe now holds.
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You name your star before you submit. The name is not a username or a handle — it is the name of whoever or whatever the star is for. It can be a person, a year, a single word, an unfinished sentence. The name sits quietly beneath the star in the sky. On hover, the coordinates appear. Nothing else revealed. The depth is there when you look for it.
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Older stars dim gradually in the public sky as newer ones arrive — not deleted, just quieter. Your own star is always fully lit when you visit it. There is no archive section, no dead star collection, no language around healing timelines. The dimming is the natural rhythm of a sky that keeps filling.
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The solidarity in Afterglow is not designed through features — it is witnessed through presence. You look at a field of stars knowing each one is someone's thing, and you feel it without touching it. Adding an interaction mechanism would replace that feeling with something smaller and more familiar. The sky is not a social graph. It is a sky.
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Some people will not open an app and type a letter. A father who has been navigating a medical system since 2017, who just buried his son and his mother, is not going to compose prose. But he might press a button and speak. Voice as input makes the product accessible in the way that actually matters — not compliance-accessible, but humanly accessible. The act of speaking into something that holds it is itself the thing.
THE NAME
The cosmic microwave background is called the afterglow of the Big Bang.
The oldest light in the universe. It’s been traveling for 13.8 billion years and it’s still here, still measurable, still real. The source might be gone but the light remains.
Named for what persists after the source goes quiet. Named after my brother, Felix.