Client
Self initiated
Year
2026
Reach
N/A
Industry
Lifestyle, Journaling
The product
Blomm is a journal for one memory a day. A few words, a photo, a drawing, or all of them on one page. Every day you keep grows a plant, and over the year the garden fills in, so you can see at a glance which weeks you showed up for.
It is free on the App Store and private by default. There is no Blomm account. Entries live on your phone and sync through your own iCloud. The app counts how it is used, never what anyone writes, and that can be switched off. No advertising and no tracking.
I design and build it myself. That covers the design system in Figma, the screens and animations, and the SwiftUI app with SwiftData and CloudKit underneath.
The constraints
I wanted it to fit into the last minute before sleep. If writing a day feels like homework, the habit ends, so the ask stays at one memory and the reward shows up on the home screen straight away.
Keeping it private meant memories stay off any server of mine. Sync, widgets, reminders and the lock all work from the phone and the person's iCloud.
And it is a one-person product. Every colour comes from one set of theme tokens shared by the Figma file and the code, so a new theme is a new set of values and no screen has to be redrawn.
The work
It started as one line of text a day on a year-long grid. Since then a day has become a full journal page, the garden can be laid out three ways, and you can draw your own plants. Four parts of it are below.
The Garden
Home is the garden. Each day of the year is a seed, and each kept day is a plant. Tapping a plant opens that day, and the button in the corner writes today.
There are three ways to see it. One Month shows the current month with every day numbered. Twelve Months gives each month its own bed, all on one screen. Big Garden drops the months and plants the whole year as one field. The layout picker previews each option with your own garden, so you choose with your own days in front of you.
A Day on One Page
A day is one entry. Words, photos, videos and drawings sit on the same page, with the pictures taped into a small stack above the text. Swiping sideways moves between days, and the plants along the top slide with your finger.
Editing happens in place. The stack opens into a carousel with a bin on each card, and the foot of the page holds the gallery, the camera for today, the pencil and the motif. Drawing runs on Apple's PencilKit with an ink picker built for the app, so strokes can match the theme.
Any day can be shared as a card, saved to your photos or posted straight to an Instagram story.
Motifs
Every kept day grows a motif, picked at random from a set of hand-drawn plants and a few small creatures. Tapping the motif at the top of a day opens the picker, twelve to a page, and the change shows in the garden straight away.
The plus opens a blank canvas for drawing your own. The first time it opens, a motif draws itself to show how it works. A finished drawing is cropped to its strokes, centred and stored as a mask, so it takes the theme's ink and grows in the garden next to the others.
Planting the First Seed
Onboarding is a packet of seeds. You cut it open with a swipe, tilt the phone to pour, and the seeds settle into the empty garden. Then you pick a layout and an ink, and a short note from me explains the rest.
The ink is the theme. There are six light and six dark ones, and the app icon changes to match. Face ID can lock the journal, with a four-digit PIN for when Face ID can't see you.
