A gentle space where AI and creative expression help feelings become visible, and over time, reveal what keeps returning.
Role
Solo designer and developer. Took the project from early concept through App Store launch, shaping the experience through rounds of beta feedback along the way.
Where the idea started
In 1905, Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater published Thought-Forms, a book that depicted emotions as shapes and colors. Anger as jagged red bolts. Devotion as rising blue cones. Fear as grey hooks. They believed every feeling has a form, even if most people can't see it.
Most emotion apps today reduce feelings to a label and a chart. For people who process emotions through creative expression, there's very little.
Inner Plates started from a question: what if there was a space to sit with what you're feeling, rather than just name it? A place where emotions take a visible form you can look at, reflect on, and return to.
How the experience evolved
The app started with two separate paths:
Alchemy uses AI to generate a visual composition from selected emotions, along with a reflective line about the feeling itself, giving form to what's hard to put into words
Draw offers guided sessions with timed meditative prompts, like breathing exercises for your hands, alongside a freehand canvas
Beta testers didn't know which mode to choose or why. Two front doors felt like two separate apps sharing a screen. The fix wasn't to explain the modes better. It was to start from what people came for: a way to sit with what they're feeling. The app now opens with that question, and Alchemy and Draw follow as two ways to respond.
Over time, the journal surfaces emotional patterns across entries, helping people notice what they might not see in the moment.
From an empty journal, to choosing what to express, to seeing it become visible, to a collection that grows over time.
The same feedback showed another gap. People who came to draw often didn't know where to start. The app assumed creative confidence, but most people needed a way in. Guided drawing gave them that, a light structure that helps people slow down and settle into the act of drawing. For someone arriving anxious or overwhelmed, following a gentle prompt can be calming on its own, before any reflection even begins.
Drawing mode adapts to how someone wants to express themselves in the moment
Where Inner Plates is heading
The journal already surfaces emotional patterns over time. The next step is making those patterns useful beyond the app.
One direction is working with therapists, using the visual journal as a reflective tool between sessions. Research in art therapy suggests that visual expression can surface emotions that verbal methods miss, especially for people who find it hard to articulate what they're feeling.
Built by Fangru Wu 2026
Craft matters