Digital Postcard Sharing Platform

Timeline

August 2026

Client

Independent Project

Platform

cardfolio.club

My Role

UX/UI Designer · AI-Assisted Development (Claude, Figma)

How this story started

I’ve been using a website for years to send and receive physical postcards from people worldwide. I have sent and received postcards from the US to the Philippines, and from Kazakhstan to Denmark.

Some conversations lasted only a message or two, while others turned into friendships that lasted for years. One of them is with Toni from Spain. We would recommend movies to each other, talk about what we had watched, and keep in touch through our postcards.

Over time, sending physical postcards got too costly and took too much time. So, Toni and I switched to email. But email never quite gave me the same feeling.

There’s something special about opening your mailbox and finding a postcard you weren’t expecting. You wonder where it came from and who sent it.

I know I can’t recreate exactly the feeling of receiving a physical postcard. But maybe Cardfolio can bring that little excitement of sending and receiving a postcard into the digital world, without losing the feeling of collecting memories.

Design desicions

Once I had the idea for Cardfolio, I started thinking about how I wanted it to feel.

I didn't want it to feel like another social media platform where you add a friend or send a quick message. I wanted something more personal, slower, and a little nostalgic. Something that brings the warmth of old habits into today's digital world.

That's why I chose a retro visual style inspired by analog photography and the feeling of sharing memories. More than just storing photos, I wanted Cardfolio to create the feeling of:

"I want to share this moment with you."

Bringing the design to life with AI

This project was meaningful to me. It was also an experiment to turn my design into a real product using AI tools.

After finishing the design in Figma, I connected Cursor to Figma via MCP so it could read the design directly. Then I explained the site's purpose, how it should function, and the scroll-based interactions, using Grok 4.6 as the model in Cursor to translate that into code.

I found it worked better to build the website section by section. This way, I didn't ask AI to do everything at once. I began with the hero section. I wanted the photo frame to slide onto the screen. Then, it should pause, as if a photo was being taken, before flipping to show the back of the postcard.

I continued building the rest of the website in the same way, step by step. Then I explained the postcard creation flow and added the design.

Most of the time, Grok was close to my ideas. It didn’t always get things right, though. Sometimes, I had to point out what was missing or needed changing. Other times, I struggled to explain what I wanted. That’s where Claude came in. I could share my goals and ask how to frame them as prompts. This helped me turn my ideas into clearer instructions for AI.

I set up Resend to handle sending emails, and verified my own domain so emails wouldn't land in spam. With Grok's help, I got the whole email flow working, including showing the postcard images right inside the email.

Since Cardfolio is still a test project, I haven't bought a dedicated domain for it yet, so emails currently go out from my personal site's domain instead. Don't be surprised if you see it!

It took me several days, but turning an idea from Figma into a working product was exciting. Without today’s AI tools, this project might have taken months or stayed at the prototype stage. Instead, I could build it in around 1–2 weeks and share it with you.

What AI helped me with

Keeping the same visual language across components and pages, since it worked from the design style I uploaded and could suggest and build within it.
Making the website responsive without designing every screen myself. It adapted layouts on its own, and I only fine-tuned where needed.
Seeing my design as a real product almost immediately, which made it much faster to spot issues and fix them directly.
Most importantly, turning what could've taken a small team months into something I built on my own in 1-2 weeks.

Right now and what is next

For now, Cardfolio lets you send the front and back of a postcard digitally. But over time, I want to take it further and turn it into a platform for sharing digital postcards.

With Cardfolio, I want to build a personal space where our photos don’t just stay hidden on our phones or get buried in social media. A place where we can share those moments with the people we care about and keep them as little memories.

Cardfolio is still a growing project. But what stays with me most is being able to turn a feeling into a real product this fast.

I hope you enjoy using it, and if you do, send me a postcard and let me know what you think 😉