The day I decided to get a second brain for my design work
If you’re a solo designer, you’ve probably felt this: your work depends on your memory. You vaguely remember a perfect layout you made three years ago, a cover with an impeccable grid, or a palette that worked with everything. But when you really need that reference… it’s gone, buried in folders, external drives, old backups, and systems you no longer use. The feeling is strange: the work exists, you created it, but it’s as if it has been erased from your mind.
For years I tried to solve this problem with discipline. Folders with dates, client codes, random screenshots, loose notes. It all worked for a month, then chaos returned: “final_final_3.indd”, duplicated folders, files with the same name in different places. At a certain point, I realised the problem wasn’t lack of organisation; it was the lack of a second brain — an external one, just for my visual archive.
That’s how the idea of using Ufish as that “other brain” for a one-person studio began. Instead of relying on my memory (or uninspired file names), I now have a visual library always available on my Mac. The focus isn’t on the file itself, but on the images that represent the work: covers, spreads, layout details, variants that got lost in folders with dozens of versions.
When I open Ufish, I don’t need to remember the project name, the client, or the folder. I see my own creative history in the form of a grid: pages, thumbnails, small visual proofs of what I’ve already produced. This completely changes the way I work. Instead of starting every project “cold”, I can quickly revisit old ideas, recover small solutions that worked really well and that, without a visual memory, would have died on some external drive.
There’s also an emotional side to this. Solo designers tend to be hard on themselves: “I don’t do enough”, “I’m not as good as the others”, “I’m always struggling to reach a certain level”. When you have a living visual archive of your journey, the conversation changes. You see how you’ve evolved over the last five or ten years. You see work you had almost forgotten, elegant solutions you created in a hurry at the time and that today inspire you again. Ufish, without saying it, reminds you: “You’ve already done excellent things. They’re right here.”
Another advantage of having this “secondary brain” is security. Some people entrust their entire file life to a single cloud. But not everyone likes the idea of their creative work feeding third-party AI models, or depending on a service that frequently changes its terms and prices. Ufish takes the opposite path: it’s an independent app that runs on your Mac, focused on generating a local visual library of your work, without using your data to train models and without locking you into a heavy subscription.
This is not just convenient — it’s almost a matter of professional identity. Having your own archive, under your control, is part of building a long and sustainable career. On top of that, we’re talking about a project that has existed since 2013, already used by thousands of designers, and that continues to be refined based on day-to-day reality, not buzzwords.
Today, when people ask me what Ufish is, my favourite answer is simple: it’s the brain that stores everything your memory can’t keep up with. You keep creating, experimenting, changing clients, styles, and tools. Ufish stays there, quietly building your visual archive. One day, when you need that 2016 magazine cover, that 2018 experimental label, or that grid that saved a project in 2020, you won’t depend on luck. You’ll open your “other brain” and it will remember for you.
And this is just the beginning. The current version — lightweight and stable — already fulfils this role as a visual memory for Mac designers. But we’re preparing a full version, with new ways to explore, filter, and reuse that archive, always with the same philosophy: independence, focus on your work, and absolute respect for your data.