A personal learning project that grew into a whole fun thing of it's own
Designer, Developer, Writer, Perpetual Student, AI Assisted
List below this time - twas a full project, ya know?
Pres Start began as a personal learning exercise — just me diving back into the fun front-end stuff like React, Vite, and Tailwind CSS. But as I iterated and added more structure, it quietly evolved into something more: a case study. And then I kept going… now it has its own AI-powered chatbot trained on the system, mostly as a learning experiment (for me, selfishly). It’s branded around my one-year-old Australian Shepherd, Presley. The whole thing is extremely serious, thank you.
What started as a sandbox became a system — a continuous work in progress and something genuinely useful (at least for me).
From the beginning, I treated Pres Start as both a design and development challenge. I designed the entire system in Figma with a focus on accessibility and customization. The component library, color palettes, tokens, and typography in the codebase are all mirrored from the Figma file — so designers can work in Figma just as developers do in code.
To bridge that gap even further, I built a custom color palette generator that outputs Tailwind-compatible design tokens. You plug in your brand color, and it generates a complete tokenized palette ready to drop into your project. That connection between visual design and implementation is a core principle of Pres Start — and one I’m continuing to build on.
